


Thou Shalt Not Eat Stones

by valancysnaith



Category: X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: BAMF Raven, Hurt/Comfort, Medical Experimentation, Poor Charles, Post-DOFP, Protective Erik, mention of Nazism in chapter 14, physical/psychological torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2016-05-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 20:54:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 25
Words: 77,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5512991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valancysnaith/pseuds/valancysnaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two months after Washington, Raven found Erik in a skeevy motel off the Florida interstate. </p><p>“They have Charles, Erik,” she said.</p><p>The bedframe shrieked. In the bathroom, the showerhead snapped in half and clattered into the tub.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Erik

**Author's Note:**

  * For [garnettrees](https://archiveofourown.org/users/garnettrees/gifts).



> Throwing my hat into the ring of "Erik's PTSD is topped only by his messiah complex" stories. Charles goes missing, Erik goes hunting, Raven goes babysitting.
> 
> Title courtesy of the amazing garnettrees, from the Sufi proverb: 'In the desert there is no sign that says, Thou Shalt Not Eat Stones.' Read all her stories but _especially_ Shame the Devil, which is a way better take on Erik's post-DOFP...issues.

Two months after Washington, Raven found Erik in a skeevy motel off the Florida interstate. He’d been renting the room by the week for the past seven weeks. Spent most of his time on the tiny balcony, basking in the hot sun and reading as many newspapers as he could get his hands on during the day, sleeping there at night under sheets stripped from the bed. Instinctively he gravitated away from enclosed spaces and complete silence, seeking out the warm night air and ambient noises—crickets, occasional voices from other rooms or the parking lot, the steady hum of highway traffic—that fell just on the safe side of sensory overload.

The television was on constantly. He drank a lot of whiskey. He grew a beard and got a tan and put out food for the cats that skulked around the motel and spoke only to the news agent, the man at the liquor store, and the old woman in #12 whose sink he fixed one day.

Clippings of articles about Washington, about humanity’s shapeshifting savior and the ongoing hunt for the nefarious Magneto, editorials about the “rise of the mutant,” started covering the mirror above the dresser, then spilled across the hideous wallpaper. Not unlike the murder collage he’d created during the hunt for Schmidt—though these articles formed a narrative that spoke less of sadistic cruelty and more of political and ideological ambivalence. Mutants existed incontrovertibly, and the American public didn’t seem to know quite how it felt about that.

Tentatively positive, it seemed, for the most part. Occasional far-right screeds aside, the general tone was one of guarded appreciation for mutantkind, or at least for its actions. Doubtless periodic reassurances, in public and in the press, from one Dr. Charles Xavier, geneticist, had something to do with that. He had Nixon’s ear, the rumors went, and the President was known for leaning heavily on his advisors.

If things were going to hell—and Erik was entirely certain that they were—it was happening quietly, and behind the scenes.

Erik would intervene, he promised himself. He had ten years of absence to make up for, and no idea how the cause had fared, if the Brotherhood still existed in any recognizable form, or if they had all gone their own way like Mystique. But even if only a few of his followers remained loyal, they would be searching for him now. He had only to reach out to any one of his old contacts.

And he would, just as soon as the thought of speaking to more than one person and planning beyond the next minute didn’t trigger a panic response that ended with him hyperventilating in the bathroom while sympathetic metallic groaning noises were wrung from the pipes in the walls. He just needed a few more days.

Then again, Raven had only ever been interested in what he needed when it coincided exactly with what she needed, and this was not one of those times. Opening his eyes to her in her natural form doing the splits above him to avoid breaking his nose after her graceful leap onto the balcony was abruptly derailed by…well, him, was not the _most_ unpleasant way Erik had ever woken up, but it didn’t exactly bode well for the day, either.

“What the _hell,_ Mystique!”

“What the fuck, Erik!” she shouted back, glaring down at him. “You lunatic, what are you doing out here?”

“What are _you_ doing out here?”

“Trying to break into your room, _obviously._ I thought you’d be, you know, _in it._ ”

“Why? Come to finish what you started in Washington?”

Sneering contemptuously always did go better when he wasn’t half-asleep and wrapped in bedsheets like a naked human burrito. Raven at least didn’t seem particularly intimidated: Erik could feel her rolling her eyes, even with her back to him, as she waltzed into his motel room and made a beeline for the coffee maker.

“I’m not going to apologize for that,” she called, briskly scooping grounds into the filter as Erik dragged himself upright and tried to process events strategically, instead of with a vague sense of tired bemusement. He’d slept more in the past two months than he had in the first six months of leading the Brotherhood, but no matter how many times he told himself that he should be bursting with energy after ten years of forced inaction, twelve hours of sleep felt like four and there were days when he woke up still exhausted.

“I wouldn’t expect you to apologize for doing whatever it took to achieve your objective. You don’t seem worried that I’ll finish what I started in Paris,” he said, trailing after her. There was a pair of sweatpants on the bathroom floor and he put them on because it seemed polite, not because he had any special pretensions of modesty around Raven.

“Oh, please,” Raven said. “If you still wanted me dead we would not be having this conversation. And if I’d really wanted _you_ dead, your funeral would have been eight weeks ago.”

“Sparsely attended, I’d imagine.”

She gave him a cup of coffee and a raised eyebrow as he came out of the bathroom, which said _ya think?_ more clearly than words, even with her enviable command of sarcasm this morning. Or maybe it was exactly her usual command of sarcasm and only seemed enviable due to the whole predawn, surprise nature of the situation.

“Would you have come?” he said inanely, sitting on the bed while she perched cross-legged on the dresser, ignoring the dozens of pictures of herself tacked to the wall. It occurred to him that this was already the longest conversation he’d had in two months.

“To your imaginary funeral? Is this your very uncomfortable way of asking if we’re still friends?”

“Friends,” Erik repeated blankly. He’d thought of Raven as a partner, colleague, subordinate, lover, and fellow soldier, and he hadn’t been lying about missing her, but he’d had one friend his entire adult life, and it wasn’t her.

“Yeah, friends. You don’t have many, so don’t throw away the ones you’ve got, okay?”

“I don’t need friends. I need—”

Raven held up a hand and made a twirling gesture that encompassed the trashcan full of empty bottles and fast food wrappers, the one change of clothes folded over a chair, the armor he’d stacked in the corner and forgotten about, and his own disheveled appearance. “If you’re about to say _followers,_ hold up and take a look around. Magneto needs followers but Magneto’s not here, is he? No one’s seen him since Washington.” 

“I don’t like what you’re implying, Mystique,” Erik growled. He meant to stare her down but there was a flash of something warm and sympathetic in her golden stare, and he looked away first, disconcerted. To cover the moment of weakness he lashed out, snapping “Or is it Mystique? This… _softness_ reeks of your brother. Am I speaking to Raven after all?”

The warmth faded from her eyes. “Don’t make the same mistake you did in Paris, Erik. The one where you assume Mystique is yours and Raven is Charles’s? It didn’t end well for you, the last time you thought you could manipulate me like that, did it? Call me whatever you want, but don’t think it means you have any say in what I do or who I am.”

Erik forced himself not to look away again, nodded once in understanding.

“Well, as long as we’re clear on that,” Raven said, and looked pointedly at the scar on his neck. Erik wanted to cover it so badly his fingers twitched, but he used both hands to lift his mug and took another sip of coffee instead, expression carefully blank.

The bullet wound had healed slowly. He’d dressed it himself, not wanting to risk a human hospital, stocking up on hydrogen peroxide and gauze at convenience stores scattered across Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia. For a week the skin had felt unbearably tender and hot to the touch while it oozed the kind of bloody pus that made him fear infection. It was still noticeably pink and the scar tissue would ensure that skin would always be uneven, but Erik had never been ashamed of any of his scars, and he didn’t mean to start with this one. Besides, it was Raven’s, after all, not Shaw’s. Somehow that made a difference.

However long he’d been lost in thought and unresponsive was too long; Raven was looking at him with concern again. He said the first thing that came to mind. “Not that I object to…coffee with a friend, but why _did_ you track me down?” 

“I need your help.”

He raised an eyebrow. “My help, or Magneto’s help?”

“Definitely yours, maybe both. Then again, Magneto never was that great when it came to the small-scale operation. Always went for the grand gesture.”

Erik opened his mouth to point out that sometimes the grand gesture was the only thing oblivious humans would respect, but then the rest of her words registered. A shiver went up his spine, some intuition he couldn’t quantify but which grated on his nerves like impure metal.

“What small-scale operation are you talking about?”

“Search and rescue,” Raven said carefully. “In conjunction with the X-Men, or what’s left of them. It’s time-sensitive.”

“I don’t understand.”

It wasn’t a lie. Erik recognized the words of the mission parameters but when he reached out to grasp their meaning, there was nothing. Blankness where a conclusion should have been, even with all the facts laid out, and that nameless dread filling his chest cavity like wet cement. He didn’t notice that his hands were shaking so badly that his coffee threatened to spill over the sides of the mug until Raven took it from him, set it aside, and sat on the bed a safe distance away.

“They have Charles, Erik,” she said.

The bedframe shrieked. In the bathroom, the showerhead snapped in half and clattered into the tub.

“No,” he said, denial instinctive. He hadn’t heard from Charles, materially or telepathically, since the clear dismissal in Washington. He hadn’t expected to, and for his own part had desired contact no more and no less than he had since the day he had vanished off a Cuban beach. For eleven years, the longing for Charles had burned, outlasting every fleeting burst of resentment and anger at the telepath’s actions and inactions, his naiveté, his stubbornness. It was a wound that never healed, and that he would have gladly ripped open again if it had. Those precious seconds in Washington of Charles fully present, his gentle telepathic touch pain-roughened around the edges, had been half-lost in Erik’s haze of shock and confusion. Everything had spun out of control so quickly—a week later, he was still struggling to believe that the world around him was real and not a dream, and the feeling of Charles in his mind always slipped away no matter how greedily he reached for it.

But even if those few treasured seconds were all Charles would give him, they were proof that he _would_ reach out, if he had no other choice. Pitiful, compared to the complete trust Charles had so foolishly bestowed on him once, but Erik would gratefully be a last resort if the alternative was nothing at all.

Surely Charles would have called for him, if something had happened.

“I’ve been to the mansion,” Raven said. “It was Hank’s idea to come find you.”

That seemed about as likely as the world’s most powerful telepath being made to do _anything_ against his will, but if Raven was telling the truth…

He flinched when her fingers tentatively wrapped around his, her face set in determination. “You know I wouldn’t lie about this. The Brotherhood is waiting for you, we have work to do, but I wouldn’t have come _now_ if it wasn’t urgent." 

Erik nodded; _that,_ at least, he believed. Raven’s youth, natural impatience, and his own teachings had ensured that she could be callous, but she wasn’t heartless.

“Two weeks ago, Charles and Alex went to Washington,” she said. “Standard meeting with some political bigwig, nothing out of the ordinary. They were supposed to take the train back from Union Station that night. Alex went to check their bags, two minutes tops, and when he got back Charles was gone. Just…vanished. No one had seen a thing. Hank thinks they were either wearing telepathic blockers or Charles was shielding heavily because of the crowds and didn’t sense danger until it was too late.”

The balcony railing ripped free of the concrete and soared across the parking lot forcefully enough to send up a shower of sparks when it hit the ground. Two weeks. Two weeks Erik had been watching cartoons and soap operas, practicing small talk about the weather and spending entire afternoons focused on the interstate, his metal-sense caressing thousands of cars as they drove by. And all that time Charles had been missing. Two weeks paled in comparison to his own imprisonment, but Erik knew intimately that there was no necessary correlation between damage done and time spent in the hands of the enemy. He had inflicted more pain in one hour than the government had inflicted on him in ten years. And Erik knew torture, how to dispense it and how to resist it; Charles didn’t. He could be dead or beyond help already.

“He was helping them and they turned on him,” he said distantly.

“They’ll regret it,” Raven promised. “We’ll make them regret it. But first we have to get him back.”

Erik forced himself to nod in agreement even as every base instinct howled for blood. Anyone who had touched Charles from the moment he was taken until now, caused him even the slightest bit of pain—Erik would sink his powers into every fragment of iron in their blood and superheat it. He would trigger fatal seizures by inducing electromagnetic storms in their brains. He would inflict the damage himself, by hand, and never mind an eye for an eye: he would take a life for an eye, if that eye was Charles’s. It took every ounce of restraint and the melting of the coat hangers in the closet for him to choke back that intoxicating rage and focus instead on the facts. Revenge could wait; it always had, for him.

“Who are they?”

“Hank is following up on some leads. We don’t have a lot. They’re not CIA or FBI. Nothing political. My hunch is that we need to take a closer look at Boliver Trask’s old cronies. Could be a friend or protégé out there trying to carry on his work.”

“Have you spoken to him?”

“Speaking to Trask is a little more complicated than stopping by and ringing the doorbell. Since they decommissioned the Sentinel project he’s been in Allenwood, maximum security.”

 “Is that a problem for you?” Erik said wryly.

Raven cracked her first smile since arriving. “Good point. You think that’s where we should start?”

This was happening too quickly. He had thought he had more time. Erik summoned some loose change from the bedside table and began weaving it through his fingers casually, hoping to distract Raven—or perhaps himself—from sensing the tiny tendrils of panic creeping through him, growing stronger with every heartbeat. Deep breaths, smooth thoughts, and no giving in to the dizziness that overtook him at the idea of a rescue mission now, when he still shook off flashbacks a dozen times a day. The house-of-cards fragility he sensed in his own thoughts was worrisome, but Raven and the others would be looking to him for leadership, and Charles could even now be in worse shape, with none of Erik’s coping mechanisms.

And that was to say nothing of the danger they could all be in, if his captors found a way to manipulate Charles’s telepathy.

“Allenwood _is_ on the way to the mansion,” Erik heard himself say, and then quickly, helplessly, “Mystique, I’m not—”

He broke off, unsure of the right word. _Well? Myself? Entirely confident in my own sanity?_

“I know,” she said. “If you were I’d be worried. But it can’t matter now. This is Charles.”

It should have irked him that after all this time, that was still all it took. Instead Erik reached for his coffee mug with steady hands and took a tepid sip calmly. He had no belongings to pack but would need to procure some new clothes, a weapon, some useful odds and ends. And a car. A flight would be quicker but there was no time to fake the necessary documents, and he could steal a car without even touching it. As long as he kept his mind occupied with the miniscule details, focused on the next step and nothing more, he could remain in control of himself and the mission. He could bear anything if it meant Charles would be safe. In any case, Raven would be there to haul him back, if he went over the edge. 

“Well,” he said. “I suppose I should find a shirt, then.”

“And a razor,” Raven said helpfully. “You look like a hobo.” 

Erik almost smiled.

 

 


	2. Charles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meanwhile, Charles...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (tw: human experimentation, non-consensual drug use, reckless disregard for the health of a disabled person)

Hell on Earth, Charles decided, was an itchy nose when you were strapped to an operating table with no way to scratch it. His captors had invested in psychiatric-hospital grade suicide prevention restraints that refused to give no matter how hard he wrenched his wrists against them, and a leather band across his forehead kept him from turning his head. He was held completely immobile, and now his nose itched, and his only consolation was that his captors probably mistook his thrashing for manly defiance and not childish irritation at base physical discomfort. A week ago he would have asked one of them to scratch it for him, but a week ago he had been attempting to build comradery via a kind of faux-joviality, a _we’re all in this together, chaps_ mentality, which had done no good at all and been discarded in favor of this week’s sullenness interspersed with screams as necessary.

His fever was getting worse, too.

Half a dozen familiar faces, all wearing identical white lab coats and telepathy-proof helmets, moved around him, tapping keyboards and adjusting IV lines and prepping syringes. They spoke in low voices, were polite and professional, called him “Dr. Xavier.” It was worse than silence or cruelty could have been, to have that modicum of respect and have it make no difference. They would still hurt him.

Even strapped down, Charles could always tell when the project director entered the room: the atmosphere shifted subtly, the technicians’ body language conveying respect and, in most cases, fear. Whoever he was, he was ex-military, cold and calculated and clinical—Charles thought of him as the General, though he made a point of calling him “you bastard” or “bloody idiot” in conversation.

“Good morning, Dr. Xavier,” the man said, stepping into Charles’s field of vision and snatching up the clipboard that held his recent vitals. “Fever holding around 101, I see. Excellent. Several instances of involuntary muscles spasms of the lower body overnight…vomiting at 0300 and 0600 hours…traces of blood in urine. All as expected, very good. Are you experiencing any lingering effects from yesterday’s tests?”

Yesterday had been LSD. The General had had high hopes. As he had explained helpfully while a technician injected a worryingly high dose into the IV, LSD caused visual and auditory hallucinations, dissociation, and suggestibility, with the possibility of panic attacks or psychotic episodes if the patient experienced stress or negative emotions while the drug was in effect. Figuring a persistent, untreated urinary tract infection wasn’t stressful enough, the General had casually broken Charles’s left pinky as well.

“Couldn’t sleep last night,” Charles said. He had learned quickly that lying gave him no advantages, and always resulted in punishment. “And for a while time passed strangely. Felt…stretched. Stopped a few hours ago.”

The General nodded, made some notes on the clipboard. “You seem lucid enough. Pity. We’ve had some reports of long-term psychosis, symptoms similar to schizophrenia, and it seemed a reasonable hypothesis that your powers would increase the chance of those particular side effects.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Charles dead-panned. He closed his eyes against the fluorescent lights, which only aggravated his lingering nausea and the throbbing pain that had taken up permanent residence right behind his eyeballs. He had neglected to inform the General that he had tried LSD once during his decade-long bender; in fact, he’d even pretended to be more afraid than he was, begging the technicians to help him, warning them that telepaths and hallucinogens should never mix. As he remembered it, LSD was unpleasant but not disastrous: spooked by colors that _felt_ wrong and a creeping sense that he was losing himself, he had reached out for Hank and the few remaining students, coasting along their normal, everyday sensory input until his own perception of reality was firm again. The General’s test parameters had inadvertently allowed the same thing.

And there it was. Charles sighed in relief as his telepathy suddenly encountered a new mind, unshielded and _real_. Struggling up from a drugged unconsciousness, quickly souring with fear, it bled information effortlessly—young man, recent father, communist leanings, and Charles soaked every drop up gratefully. The helmet-wearing technicians who moved around him might as well have been robots, or corpses, and even the General felt like an abstraction more often than not, for all that he held conversations and inflicted pain like a real person. 

The wave of dread that swept over Charles wasn’t simultaneous yet but would be soon. He knew he was being conditioned. An unshielded mind meant the test was about to begin, and his instinctive joy as his telepathy unfurled like a crushed flower would soon be indistinguishable from his fear that this would be the day they finally succeeded in damaging him beyond repair. 

“All right, Dr. Xavier, we’re about ready to begin,” a distant voice was saying. 

Drifting dizzily, Charles didn’t respond until pain exploded on the left side of his face. Even then it was a struggle to open his eyes; his flinch away from the lights and another blow was mostly instinctive. 

“With me, Dr. Xavier?” the General said. “We’re trying something new today. Well, something old, actually.”

He held a thin glass vial in Charles’s limited field of vision. For a moment it appeared empty, but then the light caught the clear liquid at the bottom, hardly more than a few drops. 

“Got this off the Jerries at the end of the war. Of course, like yourself, they didn’t really have much choice but to be accommodating, did they? Why they held off mass-production on this little beauty I’ll never understand, though I sure am glad they did, for all our sakes. Packs quite a punch, sarin.”

“You said you didn’t want to kill me,” Charles managed through suddenly-numb lips, proud that his voice shook only a little. He couldn’t take his eyes off the vial and those few, insignificant-looking drops. Not for the first time, he cursed his eidetic memory. Every newspaper article he’d ever read that mentioned the mysterious G-series of toxic nerve agents that had come into the Allies’s possession after Germany’s surrender flashed before his eyes again, the black newsprint stark and inescapable. The Soviets had chemical and biological weapons, Nixon promised; it would be suicidal not to have the same. Catastrophic synthetic compounds--insecticides for humans--ready to be released into civilian crowds without warning. Everyone in Times Square dead in seconds, their bodies catapulted into overdrive to the point of respiratory failure, convulsions, paralysis. 

“Oh, of course we don’t want to kill you. No, we’re very interested in keeping you alive, if not necessarily...intact,” the General said. “Sarin isn’t fatal in very, very small doses. Normally it’s dispersed in its aerosol form, of course, but it seemed inefficient to clear the room and introduce it through the ventilation ducts, and I was informed that a face mask would deliver too concentrated a dose.” 

He turned away and picked up a pipet filled with another clear liquid as one of the technicians rolled a tray closer, too deep in Charles’s peripheral vision for him to see its contents. Knowing it was futile, he thrashed against his restraints, tried to turn his head despite the leather strap, desperate to see what was coming even if he couldn’t stop it. The not knowing was almost as bad as the pain itself. 

“I’d advise you to be quiet, Dr. Xavier,” the General said absently. “I’m going to dilute the liquid form in water and the proportions are crucial. A drop too much sarin, a drop too little of the solvent, and the results could be...disappointing. It’s in your best interest to let me concentrate.”

Charles fell obediently silent, pressing his lips together tightly to quiet his gasping breaths, though he couldn’t help the rattling of the wrist restraints as uncontrollable shivers racked him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt in control of his own body.

“You can’t honestly think I’ll swallow that voluntarily,” he said, voice high and breathless with fear, when the General turned around with the prepared dose in a small beaker.

“Goodness no—we give you far more credit than that. We’re going to administer the dose via an orogastric tube. It’s a common practice in prisons and mental hospitals—force-feeding of political dissidents on hunger strikes, that sort of thing. Unfortunately, we can’t sedate you, since sarin is quite fast-acting and we wouldn’t want to miss its effects, so it may hurt a little. Nothing we can do about that, I’m afraid.”

Charles looked up at the ceiling, willing the tears not to fall but barely noticing when they did anyway. He was so tired, and afraid, and tired of being afraid. He wanted Raven the way children wanted things—so completely and with such desperation that his need canceled out the rest of the world, became all that he was. And—there was no point in lying to himself now—he wanted Erik too. Sometimes when the pain was so bad that he slipped away from his body, he saw them coming for him: Raven, so fierce and focused, dispatching the technicians with a dancer’s grace, while Erik faced down the General, incandescent with rage. Charles never allowed himself to dwell on what exactly Erik would do; the more murderous his fantasies, the closer he became to the monster they wanted him to be. He preferred the moment Erik bent over him, breaking the restraints with a thought, whispering soothing nonsense and then lifting him up and away, away, away. 

Odds increased by the day that he would never see either of them again. Even if they were within his range, his grasp on his telepathy was too unstable. There was no guarantee he wouldn’t telepathically lobotomize them with a simple projection. That would please the General—the increasing amount of physical abuse was evidence of his disappointment that Charles hadn’t yet involuntarily lashed out at any of the poor bastards brought in as guinea pigs—but even a few days of rest or antibiotics weren’t worth harming Erik or Raven. He kept his shields strong to protect them, and condemned himself instead. It felt like a fair trade, somehow.

 _You were right, my darlings_ , he thought into the wailing vacuum of his own mind. _My dear Erik, my beautiful sister. You tried to warn me and I wouldn’t listen. So convinced I knew best, you see. Thought even if I couldn’t reach all of them I could reach the important ones, the humans with power, bring you the friends you’ll never make, not you solitary warriors of the old guard. You never would have trusted a human to help you—you barely trust each other. You’ll never fall into a trap like this._

That was some comfort, at least. Barely recovered from his decade of self-destruction, mentally if not physically still an addict, the school not yet reopened, Charles Xavier’s death would be no great loss. Other mutant rights advocates more eloquent than he would lend their voices to the cause. He could only hope that it ended here, in this lab—respiratory failure, a heart attack, a brain embolism—and not after his mind snapped. A deranged telepath let loose in the middle of a civilian population, projecting uncontrollably, spreading his insanity faster than any biological weapon, would convince the entire country that the Sentinel program was crucial for national security. 

Somehow he managed a bitter smile through the tears as a technician lifted a long plastic tube into his field of vision; the diameter seemed far too wide to fit down his throat, but he didn’t doubt that they would force it to. 

“You’re making a mistake,” he choked out. “You’re playing with fire, you utter, utter morons, and by the time you see it, it will be too late. Did none of you _ever_ read _Frankenstein_ in high school English class? You do not want an insane telepath as your creation, I _promise_.”

The General smiled. “I did, and found it quite inspiring. Proof that the natural order was no more mandated than conventional morality, as long as one could face the consequences. Poor Frankenstein didn’t have the stomach for it, but I assure you, Dr. Xavier—I do.”

As the tube descended, Charles managed a shaky burst of comfort to the man strapped down next to him and then raised his shields. Until the past few weeks, he hadn’t been alone in his own head with his powers since he was nine years old, and every time he locked his telepathy away within the confines of his skull the silence transmuted into shrieks that sounded like his voice. The more powerful the drug, the harder it was to remember why it was so important to hold himself apart from the blessed relief of the unshielded mind mere feet away, open and leaking feelings like a call for help only Charles could answer.

_Raven Raven Raven Erik Erik Erik stay away not safe but I need your strength/stubbornness/courage_

Then the world burned away, consumed by a fiery pain in his throat that even the blood trickling down his esophagus couldn’t extinguish. Charles began to scream, and choked, and tried to imagine Erik’s eyes looking down at him, bright with tears and love and forgiveness.

He realized the instant before the sarin took effect that he couldn’t remember Erik’s eyes at all.


	3. Erik

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Featuring an awkward road trip.
> 
> (tw: panic attack, mention of past experimentation)

“I’ve got him, Hank. Yes. Yes. Look, neither of you are happy about it, I know, but you’ve got twenty-four hours to get over it. Meet us at that motel outside Philadelphia, this time tomorrow. We’re going after Trask.”

An exasperated sigh.

“I _know,_ Hank, but we’ve been driving for fourteen hours straight and unless you want him to go into this sleep-deprived—right. See you tomorrow.”

Raven stepped out of the phone booth, wearing the blonde, blue-eyed disguise that she defaulted to in public. (When Erik had asked her in a distinctly accusatory tone why she was hiding her true form again she had only laughed, morphed into a perfect Elizabeth Taylor, and said, “I’m famous, darling, hadn’t you heard? Everyone _adores_ Mystique. I simply don’t have time to be signing autographs.”) With her fashionably oversized sunglasses on it was difficult to read her expression when she saw Erik already waiting by the car, gas tank refilled and a plastic bag full of sandwiches and sodas on the hood next to him. In Atlanta he’d picked up a black turtleneck and atrociously-patterned bellbottoms; as long as she kept her eyes above his waist, he looked almost like the Erik she’d known ten years ago. The déjà vu was pleasant and awkward, by turns.

“How much of that did you hear?” she said.

“Enough to know you’ll be trying to tuck me into bed early tonight,” he said dryly.

“Impressive. Your hearing’s gotten better. That could come in handy.”

“I had the same sights and smells for years but if I listened hard enough sometimes I could hear the guards changing shifts, or the generators humming. It wasn’t much, but it helped.”

Suddenly flushed with embarrassment, Erik put his own sunglasses on and slid into the driver’s seat. For a man who’d struggled to speak twenty words a day for months he’d become practically garrulous overnight. Raven asked more questions than she answered—he couldn’t decide whether she was trying to help by drawing him out or waiting for him to betray new weaknesses—and more often than not his brusque responses went off the rails into tangents that followed no logical train of thought. Half the time he couldn’t even remember what he’d said. The sensory input even along the rural highways up the East Coast was nearly overwhelming, a heady combination of farm smells and bright midsummer colors and periodic towns or dairy farms that brushed reassuringly against his metallokinesis. He was distracted easily and often, and only saved from panic attacks by the comforting anchor of the black convertible they’d stolen in Florida and the near-total absence of any human contact besides Raven. It was an uneasy equilibrium, but it had gotten them this far.

This far was a sleepy college town somewhere in Virginia. It was evening going on night, the highway that would allow them to avoid Washington, DC was narrow and winding, and trading off turns at the wheel meant that they hadn’t stopped for anything but gas and food since leaving Florida. Erik was exhausted and Raven had nodded off in the passenger seat several times that afternoon.

“I saw a motel on the edge of town,” he said as he pulled out of the parking lot. “If we press on now we’ll have to keep going until Baltimore. It’s too risky to stop anywhere closer to Washington.”

“Motel,” Raven agreed, taking a long sip of the most heavily caffeinated soda the gas station had offered. “Even you can’t stop a car wreck if you’re asleep at the wheel. Hurry up, _Gunsmoke_ starts in a few minutes.”

They were checked in by the opening credits as newlyweds Frank and Ava Johnson, sliding back into old patterns from the days when the Brotherhood’s victory had seemed not only attainable but even something close to fun. Raven liked naming their aliases after famous Hollywood couples, never using the same one twice, while Erik insisted on forgettable surnames and tried not to roll his eyes while she did a flawless impression of a ditzy bride, chatting up a storm with the poor sod behind the desk. Like always, Erik took the side of the bed nearest the door, Raven checked the bathroom for alternate exits, and they unpacked the bare minimum necessary for the night, toothbrushes and pajamas, weapons to keep under their pillows. Erik tried not to remember how Charles used to unpack his suitcase entirely, folding his innumerable ugly sweaters into cheap motel dressers like they were staying forever instead of a single night. Erik had told him that it was strategically idiotic, but Charles never had learned how to listen.

“Come eat your turkey club before I do,” Raven said, lounging on the bed in her natural form, eyes glued to the TV like it had her full attention.

“Later. I’m going to take a shower,” Erik said.

He didn’t miss the way Raven’s golden eyes cut to him as he crossed the room, surprise and suspicion in them before she set her face in a placid mask. She was good but Erik was better, and he knew that she had at least half her attention on him at all times, waiting for him to—what? Snap? Attack? Run? He had had enough of people watching him, analyzing his movements; it felt like an itch under his skin, a fly buzzing by his ear, slowly driving him insane.

“Don’t be too long—I want hot water too,” Raven said.

Erik turned around, fighting down a spike of anger. “At some point you’re going to have to let me out of your sight, Mystique. You may as well learn that now, or your paranoia will make you useless tomorrow.”

Raven visibly vacillated between denial that she was any such thing and amusement that he of all people was cautioning against paranoia before she simply sighed. “I’m just trying to help, Erik.”

“Don’t try so hard,” Erik said shortly, before he closed the bathroom door firmly and fused the lock shut with his powers.

He could have sworn he only closed his eyes for a second, but when he opened them again he was in the shower, and had been for long enough that his chest and stomach were bright red from the scalding water. There was shampoo on his hands and in his hair and an oddly-syncopated gasping sound echoing off the cheap tiled walls that he eventually recognized as his own breathing. Everything was white, the shower, the peeling wallpaper, the cabinetry and sink and toilet, and there were no windows, and for a horrible, eternal second he was back _there_ and everything since his breakout was a prolonged hallucination, a desperate attempt by his splintering psyche to save itself. The Brotherhood, Mystique, _Charles—_ they had all left him and he was going to die here, alone, separated from his people, the way it should have been so long ago, he was never supposed to live past Mama, past Schmidt, past Charles—

His knees hit the floor and the sink imploded at the same time. There was a loud thumping noise in his ears, something pounding like a drum: his heart, Raven at the bathroom door, both. An ominous combination of groans and pops came from the pipes as Erik scrambled for control, head bowed, rocking back and forth to a rhythm that came from nowhere.

As always, it was pain that finally grounded him—this time the sharp sting of shampoo as the soapy water ran into his eyes. As pain went it was piercing and yet utterly mundane, almost calming. He lifted his head into the cooling water and let it wash away, imagining his panic and hallucinations washing away too, and then he forced himself to stand up, step around the puddle from the now-overflowing sink, and open the bathroom door.

Raven stood there, wild-eyed and furious, utterly unimpressed by his nakedness.

“I used all the hot water,” he said. “Sorry.”

“You fucking _asshole,_ ” she shouted, taking in the ruined bathroom. Then, a beat later: “Oh my God, have you been _crying_?”

Erik rolled his eyes, wincing only a little at the lingering pain; his _eyeballs_ felt tender. “Shampoo, Mystique. Try not to overreact.”

“You’re telling _me_ not to overreact?” Her eyebrows shot towards her hairline, he thought. It was sometimes difficult to tell, with the blue skin.

“I’ll fix it,” he said. “May I get dressed first?”

“Please do. Are you planning on joining a nudist colony or something? Because otherwise this, for the _second_ time—” She gestured vaguely in his direction “is a little weird. Unless it’s a hint which is particularly unsubtle, even for you—” 

“It’s not a hint,” Erik interrupted hurriedly, and hoped his movement toward his suitcase and pajamas came off as a dignified stroll and not a desperate scurry. His physical intimacy with Raven was so far in the past and his current emotional intimacy with her so complicated that the handful of times they’d fallen into bed together in the year before his arrest seemed almost ridiculous. He still appreciated her aesthetically, in that vague way he appreciated great works of art or anyone beautiful and dangerous, but they both knew that their short-lived relationship had been more about Charles than either one of them. Missing him desperately—though not in the same fashion—and horribly lonely, they’d slept together because each reminded the other of him, because their mutual grief transmuted into rage and the line between violence and sex was thin, because they could fuck each other or fuck over the whole world. It had been rough and unhappy and when Raven had “left him” for Azazel Erik had almost felt glad.

“Good,” Raven said, so clearly relieved that Erik contemplated being offended. “I’d hate to have to turn you down a second time. So what is it?”

“It’s complicated,” Erik said slowly, pulling on a t-shirt and sweatpants. “For ten years I wore a prison uniform. They only took it off to experiment on me. There were…invasive tests, drugs that numbed my legs or felt like fire, new scars so I could never forget. Sometimes for no other reason than to humiliate me. My body hasn’t felt like my own in a long time. Seeing it now, feeling it, knowing it’s under my control…it makes me stronger. Real.”

Raven nodded, her expression softening as she understood. “But you don’t like being touched, do you?”

Erik shook his head. He’d admitted too much already, given away a crucial weakness, and couldn’t decide if the nausea that churned in his gut was due to that or the memories of those experiments that drifted up, hazy with drugs and pain and despair.

“For the same reason,” Raven said, not a question. “You want to be in control of it. It wasn’t your choice before, but it is now.”

“This conversation is over, Mystique.”

“This mission isn’t, _Erik._ ”  

Ten years ago the command would have worked; Raven would have rolled her eyes or flounced away, something that reminded him that while she had strength and potential, she was also young and spoiled, thanks to Charles’s influence. But she would have listened. She had questioned him but never disobeyed him, respected the hierarchy of the Brotherhood, understood the importance of a united front before people who would gleefully capitalize on any sign of weakness—the humans, the X-Men, Emma Frost, it made no difference. That diffident girl had vanished, replaced by an impatient vigilante who had learned how to trust herself and forgotten how to trust anyone else. Erik understood; so had he. But Raven’s ten years of freedom had made her stronger, and Erik’s ten years of captivity had made him…unrecognizable, he thought at his lowest moments.

“Look,” Raven said more gently. “I understand that you’re experiencing…side-effects. But we have to have each other’s backs for this. Truce, limited time offer, okay? I don’t care if you trust me completely, I don’t care if you like me at all, I just need to know that you won’t get in my way tomorrow. Cause a diversion, sure. But let me handle Trask, let me find out where Charles is, and let’s get out of Allenwood _quietly_ before we tip off the bastards that have him.”

“And what about them?” 

“Them, you can have. I’ll even stop Hank from stopping you. But Trask is _mine._ ” She took a step closer, almost within arm’s reach, careful and calculated. “Erik, we don’t have the time to circle each other warily while we learn how to work together again. I’m rescuing my brother, and you’re with me or against me. It’s that simple.”

Erik’s head spun. Still reeling from his panic attack in the shower, flayed open emotionally by the intimacy of the conversation, overwhelmed by the world-shattering (perhaps literally, if they failed) significance of the mission to save Charles, he wanted nothing more than to shrink away, disappear into darkness and safety. But under that, rising like a warm ocean current into the most frigid parts of his soul, there was his oldest friend, rage, and Raven’s promise: _Them, you can have._ The possibilities churned in his mind: all his fantasies of revenge, condoned, _aided_ by his old second-in-command. His powers (almost) entirely under his control again. And a cause he could believe in— _Charles must be safe—_ that would prepare him for the jarring but necessary return to _the_ cause— _all of us must be safe._ Like the past ten years had never happened. He would show restraint tomorrow, to unleash twice the destruction on the day after.

“I’m with you,” he said.

“Good,” Raven said. Then, with a grin that banished the stifling solemnity in the air, “But you’re still fixing the bathroom like, now. And don’t try to bullshit me about cold water, I _know_ you can heat the pipes any time you want to.”

“Yes, Mrs. Johnson.”

 Erik grabbed a stack of towels from the closet to wipe up the small lake that had formed courtesy of the broken sink. Before he got to work, he rested his hand on Raven’s shoulder; lightly, and only for an instant, but it was a start.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Charles and Erik will meet soon, I _promise_. Also I didn't expect anyone to actually read this, much less like it...so y'all are the best, basically. If you have any requests for plot points, or things you want to see, or whatever, let me know? :)


	4. Charles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles hits the breaking point.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: kinda graphic violence, non-consensual drug use, human experimentation, non-consensual use of telepathy, PTSD-style flashbacks
> 
> (ngl I feel bad about this one, guys)

In one of his lucid moments, Charles realized he had picked the wrong animal for the man the technicians brought in at the beginning of every experiment. That single unshielded mind, a temptation he knew was forbidden even when he couldn’t remember _why,_ wasn’t the guinea pig. Charles was the guinea pig. Those men were canaries, fluttering within his increasingly unstable mental coal mine while the technicians set off sticks of dynamite at periodic intervals and hoped for an avalanche. As an extended metaphor it left something to be desired, but then again formulating it had helped pass an extremely unpleasant afternoon on some unidentified opiate, so he was inclined to forgive himself any poetic shortcomings.

The comparison did come with one disturbing implication: canaries in coal mines were, by definition, expendable.

“What do you do with them?” he asked the General after yet another failed test. Vomit that consisted mostly of blood and stomach acid still dripped from the corner of his mouth, drying tacky on his neck, in his hair. His vision was too blurred to see more than the vague outlines of the two technicians hauling today’s canary away, the unconscious mind buzzing faintly like a radio tuned between stations. This one had been young, high-strung by nature and panicked by the situation, and after an hour of steeling himself against pain that never came his distress had reached a fever pitch approaching insanity. For the boy’s sake and for his own, Charles had gently pushed him into unconsciousness; the comfort of another mind vanished when that mind was essentially cannibalizing itself.

The General stood somewhere down by his feet, not that Charles could see what was happening very well, or feel it at all. Possibly he was just trying to stay away from the pools of vomit that had formed under and on the chair. There had been the slightest give in the restraints this time, just enough for Charles to lean to the side and aim away from his body, but eventually he had become too weak for even that, had concentrated only on not choking to death. The smell was overpowering, his mouth tasted foul, and his voice was barely a rasp.

“Tell me what happens, when they leave,” he said again, more insistently. All this time he had avoided thinking about it, telling himself there could be no good answer, and now suddenly he couldn’t bear the not knowing.

“Minor discoloration of skin in patches below the knees and elbows, excessive vomiting, slight worsening of fever…and from the way you keep squinting I assume blurred vision.” The sound of writing ceased, followed by the rhythmic tapping of a pen against a plastic surface. “We debrief them, of course. Some are more cooperative than others. Occasionally the process gets…complicated.”

“You torture them to find out if _I_ tortured them?”

“We’d rather not, I assure you. It’s time-consuming and inconvenient for everyone, but we’d be tremendously negligent to allow any new information on telepathic contact to escape our notice just because we asked too nicely.”

Charles bared his bloody teeth, the closest he could manage to a smile. “Take off that helmet and I’ll give you all the _new information_ you can handle.”

“I have no doubt you would,” the General said, flashing that false avuncular smile that Charles had so grown to loathe. “Well, after the debriefings we can hardly release them back into the general population, knowing what they know, can we? Besides, as I’m sure you’re aware, they’re all traitors, spies, war criminals, or degenerates of some sort. Not one life among them worth prolonging—I don’t know why you exert so much effort trying to protect them.”

“You kill them,” Charles translated. His stomach would have turned if it hadn’t already been empty, shrunken and heavy like a stone in his belly. “All of them? From the beginning?”

“Don’t be surprised if the symptoms persist for the next few hours. The radioactive material we injected into your bloodstream will take twenty-four hours for your body to process fully,” the General said instead of answering, which was answer enough. To match his helpful habit of explaining exactly what was going to happen to Charles before each experiment, he also liked to recap the day with all the detached courtesy of a medical professional while Charles was still restrained, sometimes still crying from the pain, sometimes bleeding or insensate or trapped in wild delusions. “When the restraints are removed try not to scratch, pick at, or otherwise irritate the radiation burns on your arms and legs. Have a good evening and I’ll see you tomorrow, Dr. Xavier.”

 _Dr. Xavier_ sounded like a stranger now. Someone with authority, someone these men would listen to when he said no, please, stop. No one listened to Charles, yet they still called him by that useless honorific, though he suspected there was more mockery than respect behind its use, now.

It was difficult to say. His grasp on tone and intent was nearly nonexistent—his focus too scattered, and the words that emerged from the technicians’ clay mouths hardly more than meaningless sounds. He knew they meant something the way he knew the odd sensations in certain parts of his body meant something—but instead of knowing _what,_ he knew only suspicion mixed with dread, overshadowed by terrible uncertainty. Even after they freed him from the restraints, hosed him off in a wet room, and then brought him back to his cell, there was always a lingering sense of…damage. Several fingers he couldn’t move, an enduring pain his neck, hitches in his breathing. They had given him antibiotics when his UTI began to interfere with the tests, but not enough to cure it, just enough to alleviate the worst of the symptoms. And something _squished_ when he touched a few of his ribs.

It was increasingly difficult to remember why that mattered. The only thing that mattered was keeping his telepathy under control, and the easiest way to do that was simply sleep. Go away from it all, for as long as he could.

That night was a bad one. The adrenaline rush that obscured the worst of the persistent pain faded; the radiation sickness didn’t. There was nothing left to throw up but that didn’t stop his body from trying, spasms and convulsions jerking him back to miserable alertness every time he began to succumb to exhaustion. None of his sleep that night was restorative, and when the technicians retrieved him the next morning he was already on the verge of tears. He drifted in and out of consciousness as they wheeled him back to the lab, his mind instinctively shying away from the syrupy hysteria that lurked on the far side of wakefulness.

“I’m beginning to doubt our central thesis, Dr. Xavier,” someone was saying.

Charles struggled to open eyelids that felt cemented shut, realized he couldn’t remember when he had been strapped back into the chair, or when the General had arrived. No new mind beat at his shields, so at least he knew he hadn’t been injected with anything yet.

“So far these tests have involved drugs that are primarily intended to disrupt the battle-readiness of enemy combatants. We had assumed that at a certain point of physical incapacitation, your telepathy would become compromised as well. But given your…preexisting condition, perhaps that was erroneous. If your physical health and your control over your powers aren’t necessarily correlated, we may do well to look in other directions. Up instead of down, for instance.”

A technician handed the General a syringe filled with liquid the color of brackish water, and following its movement was the first thing that alerted Charles to his comparative freedom. His head and neck weren’t restrained at all; his wrists were cuffed, but hastily, loosely. Hope for escape never even occurred to him—even if he could release the cuffs, he’d be free only to fall off the chair and sprawl in a useless heap in the floor—but the ability to turn his head, the knowledge he’d retain circulation in his hands by the end of the day—they were luxuries now.

“Wha’s’tha?” he managed, jerking his head toward the syringe.

“This,” the General said with ominous pride, “is phencyclidine. It’s been off the market for quite some time now, but we like to keep stashes of these things on hand.”

Charles had skimmed enough from the minds of various CIA officials and military types to know that drugs taken “off the market” for the general public often found new, less scrupulous uses, via the logic that if they were too hazardous for the health of American consumers, chances were they could be weaponized. Self-preservation as much as any moral rectitude had steered him clear of the details of those thoughts, like a baby convinced that anything out of sight didn’t exist; now, because he’d been such a coward, he would gain that knowledge first-hand.

“Nasty bit of business, phencyclidine. Hallucinogenic, like that disappointing LSD, but with a dissociative twist. Side effects can be difficult to predict, but at this dose we can safely anticipate aggression, paranoia, depersonalization and, if we’re very lucky, some euphoria and a feeling of invulnerability.”

Charles tried to laugh, though it sounded more like a wet, hacking cough. “Wind me up and watch me go, hmm?”

“Like a child’s toy,” the General agreed genially. “Ah, here’s the final member of our team.” 

If he said anything after that, Charles missed it. The laboratory doors swung open and gurney wheels skittered on the floor, but the greatest distraction was the new mind that hurled itself against his shields. Instinctively he began to raise them, but there was still that impulse to reach out with his stifled telepathy, that desperate craving for any contact with another mind after endless hours of howling silence. He wasn’t fast enough, and his powers brushed across the surface of the stranger’s thoughts before his shields were fully locked in place.

This new mind was a cesspit, a swirling morass of dark, sticky thoughts that clung to the fragile strands of Charles’s telepathy, dragging him deeper. It felt like a bubbling tar pit, like a sickness under his skin, like a thousand cruel voices whispering vicious lies straight into his brain— 

It felt familiar.

Not in specifics—he didn’t know this man—but in type. He had felt a mind this nasty, this twisted, once before. Had buried the trauma of it deep, telepathic pain beneath physical pain, and even now he couldn’t place it, until those pitch-black thoughts dragged him into and through a memory— _a laboratory like this one, steel everywhere, a child crying on a table, babbling apologies in German, and no remorse, just sadistic triumph—_ and then Charles remembered, and there was Cuban sand under his feet and a bullet in his back and a coin in his brain—

( _Oh you poor, deluded boy,_ Shaw had hissed in his final seconds, _you really thought you could save him, didn’t you? As if he could ever love anyone more than he hates me._ )

Half his awareness still lost in that gutter of a mind, Charles gasped, “He’s a—a—”

“Don’t tell me you’re _surprised,_ ” the General said, amused. “What did you think happened to them after the war? Just because their particular…skill set…was outlawed in Germany doesn’t mean it wasn’t valuable elsewhere. We got several decades of good work out of this one, until he tried to turn traitor and work for the Reds instead.” Without warning, there was a sharp prick of pain in the bend of Charles’s elbow, and that sibilant voice whispering into his ear, “How he would have loved to get his hands on _you._ Thinks the only good mutant is a vivisected one. But by all means…protect him.”

Charles whimpered, too sick and disoriented to care how pathetic he sounded. Dignity was a distant dream and self-awareness only intermittent; what did they matter, when having them only made it worse?

No, the disdain he felt wasn’t his own. It belonged to the mind that even now churned with hatred and contempt, that sensed Charles’s telepathic presence—he’d long since lost the ability to move about a stranger’s head quietly, instead lurching through their thoughts like a drunkard—and loathed it. He didn’t mind dying but resented that it would be like this: killed by a mutant cripple half out of his mind, almost entirely out of control, weak and useless. A child with a gun, who couldn’t understand and didn’t deserve the power in his hands. Instead of pushing Charles out, that hatred clung to him, choking the strands of his telepathy like hands wrapped around his neck. At full strength, even half strength, Charles could have swatted him away easy as breathing, but now it was a struggle simply to stay above that churning morass of toxic fury. He couldn’t pull free and even if he could have his shields were failing too. 

Distantly he felt his body seizing, hands holding him down, but in the next breath all awareness of his physical body faded as a wave of something foreign swept over him. It was strength rooted in pure rage; he was Erik facing down Shaw, lifting the coin, the moment before the helmet cut him off; he was Shaw thrashing against telepathic restraints as he died; he was this pathetic creature with delusions of grandeur whose anger was really just petty jealousy— 

He _was._

And canaries were expendable, after all.

And it was so easy to drop his shields and let his telepathy, aching from disuse, sink its hooks into the man’s brain. Wild and joyous, it curled around his cerebellum, took control of his limbs—ah, _that_ was what it felt like, having legs—and moved them. Difficult at first, since it took a moment to register that the other man was restrained too, but then it was only the work of a few vicious yanks to free his wrists, to throw up a casual barrier against the pain as the bones snapped and the newly-flexible hands slid free. The screams distracted him so he silenced the vocal chords with a thought, then commanded the man to free his legs and stand. Time was short and there was a tremulous edge to this surge of strength already that Charles didn’t like. He kept the commands brief, sharp: Take the scalpel on the nearby tray. Defend against first two technicians with stabs to the neck. One hard twist of the head to take down the next. Undo Charles’s own restraints, ignore blows from behind, lift Charles’s limp body. Distribute weight on forearms, as hands now mostly useless.

Run. 

They made it halfway to the door before the gunshots rang out. The man dropped him immediately and Charles hit the floor head-first with a sick, wet _thunk_ that sounded more painful than it felt, mostly because he didn’t feel much of anything from his body at all. No physical stimuli but a vague sense of cold where his cheek was pressed against the floor. Stunned, he lay still, the strands of his telepathy snapped back into his own head like a thousand rubber bands stinging his already bruised mind.

And just in time: he felt the other’s cardiac arrest and death like the searing heat at the edge of an explosion, a shadow of the true violence and an awareness of narrow escape. Then he was gone, and Charles was alone in his head, the past few minutes a crimson-tinted blur and a horror that he didn’t quite understand chilling his blood.

A shadow fell over him and the warm barrel of a recently-fired pistol traced the line of his jaw.

“I knew you could do it,” the General said. “Well done, Dr. Xavier. I’m so proud.”

 


	5. Erik

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Three Musketeers hit up a federal penitentiary.

“You got all the way up here with no collateral damage or unnecessary human fatalities? I’m so proud,” Hank said, like an asshole. 

“Don’t tempt me, Beast. We’re not there yet,” Erik growled from the back seat. When they had ditched the convertible for a less conspicuous old VW Bug, he had let Raven take the wheel while he stretched out full-length in the back, which in a car this size meant that he was slouched with his neck and shoulders against one door while his legs dangled out the open window of the other. It was easier to pretend he was asleep than to participate in Hank and Raven’s friendly—if slightly awkward—chatter.

“I wouldn’t say _no_ collateral damage. You really did a number on that bathroom,” Raven said, also like an asshole. She was high-spirited and chipper, in her natural form in broad daylight and driving with a reckless confidence that Erik admired even as her swerving inspired the occasional bout of nausea. This wasn’t the quiet, serious pre-mission Mystique Erik remembered; this was the woman he’d seen glimpses of in Paris, self-assured and not only ready for a fight but eager for it. The anxiety for Charles, the vulnerability she’d shown in motel rooms with bad TV reception and cheap scratchy blankets—all so completely absent that Erik wondered if he’d imagined them. Seen what he wanted to see, signs that there was something still there of the Mystique he’d known. As if that would prove the continued existence of the old Magneto, too.

The old Mystique certainly wouldn’t have greeted Hank with a long embrace and reassuring smile before jerking her head back at Erik and smirking “You boys wanna hug it out before we hit the road?”, then dissolved into giggles at their expressions of mutual horror.

“Let’s…not do that,” Hank had said, with admirable restraint. Raven’s peals of laughter had followed Erik his entire impatient stomp to their new vehicle.

When Raven and Hank slipped into conversation about who had been left in charge at the mansion (Alex) and the new student that had just arrived (Ororo) and what had happened to Logan (he had taken off in the middle of the night, no note), Erik tuned them out and tried to enter the meditative state that had passed so many of the hours in prison. No surprise, that it was more difficult with so much sensory input, but this was the last moment of anything like peace or privacy that he would get for the foreseeable future. Drifting down into deep, smooth thoughts, he sought out that place between the serenity that protected his sanity and the rage that made him strong. He needed to center himself, rein in his emotions, tighten his grasp on his powers, and above all not think about what might have happened to Charles in the past thirty-six hours. If he allowed any one of the worst-case scenarios he could so easily imagine in bright Technicolor and surround sound to take root in his mind, he would wake up in the rubble of Allenwood with Trask impaled on a rebar in front of him and Raven very, very pissed off. 

The drive from Philadelphia to the United States Penitentiary, Allenwood seemed to take no time at all, to Erik’s slightly confused senses. He opened his eyes as Raven pulled off the highway and drove half a mile down a disused maintenance road, just in time to see Hank’s skin turn blue and furry in an instant.

“Great timing,” Raven said. “I was starting to worry.”

“I timed my last serum dose exactly,” Hank said. “The idea of spending the whole trip hiding in the trunk was not appealing.”

Erik looked at Hank’s hands and nails, which could now more accurately be described as paws and claws, and then at the briefcase full of delicate equipment which Hank had told them would allow him to hack into the facility’s security feed, cause strategic power outages, and trigger or silence alarms as needed. 

“Can you operate those with…those?” he said doubtfully.

Hank smiled with all his teeth. “No. But you can.”

That took a moment to sink in, and then Erik grinned back, just as feral and unamused. “That’s not how this is going to play out. I’m not going to sit in the bushes with you and twiddle my thumbs while Mystique walks into danger alone.”

“You won’t be twiddling your thumbs. You’ll be _using_ them, which is more than I can do right now. First I’ll show you how to revert the live security feed to old footage. Then you’ll track Raven using the metal in these wireless headsets I built and override the power to open the doors she needs as she needs them. I’ve got the facility’s blueprints right here.”

“I don’t need fancy gadgets to open metal doors, Beast,” Erik pointed out through gritted teeth.

“You do if this is going to look like a series of routine glitches and not suspicious enough to alert the whole complex. How’s your fine control these days?”

Any hint of condescension or pity in his tone and Erik would have demonstrated first-hand with the metal in Hank’s seatbelt. But this was Hank, whose naiveté outweighed even Charles’s and whose empathy trumped his sense of self-preservation, and his sincerity was palpable even with his expression suddenly obscured by tufts of blue fur. He wasn’t insinuating anything or looking for an admission of weakness; he was simply a scientist confirming variables in a hypothesis. Erik forced himself to consider the plan with the same objectivity.

“Better than it was. I could do it without raising any alarms,” he said. His mind replayed the image of the balcony railing soaring across the motel parking lot, the hour he had spent coaxing the broken sink back into working order. Then, grudgingly, “But it would take time. More time than we have.”

The truth, grating as it was reassuring, was that Hank had always loved Charles more than he disliked Erik, and any plan Hank came up with would be designed with Charles’s rescue above all other priorities. If he had thought Erik’s powers would expedite the mission, he would have used them. The decision not to was strategic, not personal.

Erik never had had much luck separating those, himself.

“Shifts are changing in an hour,” Raven said, saving him the embarrassment of admitting Hank was right. “New personnel should start arriving soon—we need to get back to the main road so I can play damsel in distress.”

It hadn’t really registered before now how much silent waiting was involved in this plan. First they spent a good twenty minutes crouched below the embankment near the highway while Raven, wearing her blondest curls and only slightly more clothing than she did in her natural form, assessed every car that came around the bend in the road half a mile away. Four cars passed before she said “that’s the one” and scrambled up the hill just in time to flag down a dark van with tinted windows. Feigning a sprained ankle, she hobbled up to the driver’s side window and knocked him out with one punch.

They put the body in the trunk, Erik and Hank in the back seat, and Raven in the driver’s seat wearing the face of the man whose ID badge had labeled him a midlevel guard.

“I was hoping for a warden,” Raven groused. “Someone people would be too afraid to question.”

“You look pretty mean,” Hank offered.

“That’s so sweet, Hank,” she said, and smiled with the tobacco-stained teeth of a man with a thirty-year chew habit. Hank shuddered and didn’t say anything else, although Erik caught him muttering something about checking for cancer under his breath. 

For the final approach, Erik and Hank hunched on the floor out of sight, hardly daring to breathe, while Raven flashed her security badge and spent a small eternity exchanging pleasantries with the guard at the penitentiary gate. Even when they were finally waved into the facility, the tense silence dragged on, broken only by Hank’s whispered instructions as he directed Erik to hand out and activate the wireless earbuds that would allow them to communicate with Raven while she was inside. There was no time to be second-guess, no time to say goodbye; Raven simply parked the car near the maximum security building, winked at them over her shoulder—which came off less reassuring and more alarmingly lecherous, with the face she was wearing—and walked into Allenwood. Erik didn’t even see the door swing closed behind her—Hank was already walking him through the process to switch the security cameras from live to recorded feed, still speaking in a hushed whisper despite it no longer being strictly necessary.

Then another lull. They sat with the blueprint spread out on the seat between them, tracking Raven’s progress and waiting for her hissed commands to open this door, short that circuitry, confirm that it was a left turn at this corridor. There were long stretches of silence. Erik reached out with his metal-sense, searching for the familiar signature of Raven’s earbud, but it was a miniscule, moving speck of metal surrounded by tons of iron and steel; without the blueprints to narrow the search, he would have lost her. 

“It’s getting a little hot in here, Erik,” Hank whispered.

Erik blinked, winced at the sudden sting as a drop of sweat fell into his eye. “What?”

“Unless you chill out, literally, you’re going to melt the car.”

The smell of heated leather filled the van, and Erik suddenly registered the unnatural warmth emanating from the steering wheel, door handles, seatbelts. He must have sunk his powers into the car’s metal components to ground himself while he flung out the rest of his focus to track Raven. Alarmed, he peered out the window; at least the exterior didn’t have structural damage.

“Pull back,” Hank said. “Raven knows what she’s doing.”

“None of us know what we’re doing,” Erik snapped, even as he closed his eyes and took deep breaths. “We have no idea what we’re walking into.”

“Would it make a difference if we did?”

Erik sighed, leaning back against the cooling leather as the temperature in the car fell several degrees. With forced inaction came the renewed awareness of enclosed space, of Hank not only sitting close but watching him closely. And somewhere Charles was—Charles was—

“It would make no difference at all,” he said, and that admission cost him nothing.

Raven’s voice came over their earbuds, flatter and steelier than before: “One more, Erik.” He pushed the right buttons unthinkingly, distracted by a rush of unease at her tone. Since entering the prison she had taken down three guards and locked their bodies in empty rooms, with no indication that she’d even broken a sweat; had she been injured after all? Had she been bleeding this whole time?

“Wait!” Hank said, too late.

Raven’s savage grin was audible, and abruptly Erik realized the significance of “one more” door. She had reached Trask; was probably looking at him even as she drawled, “Hang tight, you two. I’ll be right back.”

The next thing they heard was an electronic screech as her earbud hit the ground.

And then nothing.

Normally such consternation on Hank’s exaggerated facial features would be comical, but Erik was sure his own practiced poker face had deserted him just as completely. Raven was gone. Anything could be happening to her while he just sat here, useless, dumbfounded. His heartbeat skyrocketed and he was half a second from launching himself out of the car and storming the facility himself when Hank hissed something and grabbed his arm to hold him back, squeezing tight enough to bruise, and suddenly the fingers wrapped around his wrist weren’t blue and furry but a fluctuating color palette of every skin tone belonging to every guard that had ever held him back or down or still so they could hurt him. Lashing out only made it worse but he couldn’t _not_ fight, it was all he knew how to do—fight and destroy—and then someone had shoved his head between his knees and was telling him to breathe, rubbing his back gently. It didn’t hurt but the touch was intolerable, and Erik gave a distinctly feline full-body flinch, pressed his back against the door.

“Get _off me_ ,” he snapped, looking anywhere but at Hank, still breathing hard. “Don’t touch me.”

Hank raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, I won’t—just stay put and don’t freak out, okay?”

“We lost contact with Raven and you want me to _stay put_?”

“Raven cut off contact with _us_ because she didn’t want us listening in on Trask’s interrogation. If she was in trouble she would have said so. She’s stubborn, not stupid.”

“And what if she’s in trouble now, when she _can’t_ say so?”

“Then I’d be worried about them, not her! Just give her a little time. Five minutes, that’s all.”

Hank sounded more confident than he looked, but he held his ground. For a long moment they simply glared at each other, and Erik felt a vicious rush of satisfaction when Hank broke eye contact first. It was easier to regain control of himself after that, with the comforting knowledge that no matter how much else had changed, at least he could still intimidate Hank.

Though perhaps not as effectively as he’d thought, considering that Hank dropped that argument only to segue to a worse one:

“Thank you for helping us, Erik,” he ventured quietly. “I wasn’t sure you would. I mean, I was pretty sure…but not entirely sure, you know.”

Like masks to cover how desperately he didn’t want to have this conversation, Erik put on his best contemptuous smirk, half-lidded eyes and lips pressed thin, and pitched his voice at subzero temperatures. “Well, I had such fun on our last adventure, how could I say no?” 

“Really easily, actually,” Hank said dryly. “You and Charles have a history of parting on not the best of terms.”

 _Just leave it, Beast_ , Erik wanted to beg, at the same time that he wanted to sink his powers into the tons of metal that pulsed comfortingly around him and superheat it with all the strength of his grief and anger. He could probably melt the entire facility to the ground. But either response would reveal his weakness to Hank and he wouldn’t allow that to happen; Hank who had already seen Charles’s weakness, who knew what a broken man looked like and would see right through Erik’s charade, given half the chance. Erik refused him that right, as he resented that Charles had allowed it, had allowed anyone but Erik to see him at his most vulnerable. It hardly mattered that Erik had forfeited the privilege of his own free will, leaving the telepath with no one else to turn to. Charles was the only one Erik would allow to see him at his best and worst; it seemed ludicrous that the reverse wouldn’t also be true.

It had to be ludicrous, or it would be unbearable.

“I…regret that history,” Erik made himself say calmly. “I don’t regret doing what I believed was necessary to defend our people, but I regret that I didn’t protect him. In Cuba, in Washington, and now that he—”

He broke off, unable to phrase the present in words that wouldn’t break him.

“It doesn’t change a thing, but I’m here now,” he said instead. “And I will do anything to see him safe again. You should know that.”

There must have been something not quite sane in his expression, because Hank suddenly shifted uncomfortably, seemed about to disagree, and then mumbled, “That’s not a very good apology.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

Hank raised a bushy eyebrow. “A threat?” 

“An explanation,” Erik said. “For anything that might happen later.”

Hank was halfway from suspicious to truly alarmed when a beefy fist began pounding on the driver’s side door. The man who peered in the tinted windows wore a guard’s uniform and an air of poorly-concealed anticipation, and Erik bared his teeth and reached out to garrote him with the metal from his ID badge before he could call for backup. Then the stranger’s brown eyes glowed gold, and Hank scrambled to unlock the car door before Erik could redirect his powers to do it himself.

“Did you miss me?” Raven said, breathless, grinning, and blood-spattered. Without waiting for an answer, she started the van and peeled out of the lot, tires shrieking. “Buckle up, we’ve got a long drive. Trask spilled everything.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, turns out I desperately crave validation from internet strangers and the unexpectedly enthusiastic response of all you amazing people is making this go so much faster than I thought it would. Oops, or something?


	6. Charles and Erik

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, I read a fic where Charles was kidnapped and Erik rescued him and Charles couldn't separate himself from Erik, or something, and the only other thing I remember is the line "Why is Charles not-Erik?" This fic was beautiful and I've never been able to find it again and I'll give my first-born child to anyone who can help me remember more.
> 
> But since I can't, I wrote my own version, starting now.

The body in the bed bore little resemblance to the photo that sat on a bedside table in Westchester of a flushed, grinning, pleasantly drunk Charles Xavier with his arm wrapped around his beaming sister at his graduation party. The floppy brown hair, then fashionably overlong, was now congealed with oil and blood, missing clumps where EEG electrodes had been glued to his scalp and yanked off again. There were ECT burns at his temples and track marks up and down his arms and every blue vein pulsed visibly too close to the surface of paper-thin, paper-white skin. Freckled skin, English-pale, was colored with livid purple and green bruises. Red lips that had curved up flirtatiously were pinched a pale pink from dehydration, and the laugh lines at the corner of his mouth and eyes were etched deep with pain. The comfortable extra weight of a professional academic had vanished, revealing pronounced collarbones, delicate wrists, cheekbones that could cut glass, deep bags beneath closed eyes. 

Sometimes, when those eyes fluttered, there was a flash of bright blue that harkened back to the boy in the photo. Other times a few mumbled words slipped out in that same cultured accent. The medical file hanging at the foot of the hospital bed said Xavier, Charles; the doctors called him that too when they came in at all hours of the day and night, interrupting a drifting state that was neither asleep nor awake. Perhaps he _was_ Xavier, Charles. It seemed as good a name to answer to as any other.

Besides, there was something about these doctors that he didn’t like. They were professional, if not quite friendly, but he didn’t think everything they injected him with was medicine and their odd hats grated on his nerves and sometimes they spoke words he knew were English but still couldn’t understand. Or they would say odd things like, “The brass is hopping mad at the General for breaking their new toy” or “The footage from the incident is changing minds all the way up the ladder” or “Betcha the doc’s back from Allenwood within the month.” 

Intuition told him that the less of his weakness and disorientation he revealed to them the better, so he held back all his slurred questions about where he was and what had happened, did his best to be minimally cooperative. Bad things happened when he didn’t cooperate at all, even if he couldn’t quite remember what they were.

Couldn’t quite remember much of anything, really. Scattered sensations, sometimes, like black and white polaroids of memory. His cheek on a cold floor. Voices shouting, excited, worried. Cold air as someone ripped his shirt open; an electric humming, like a machine charging up; a bomb detonating inside his chest. An eternity or a minute later he was sitting fully-clothed in a shower stall while warm water soaked him to the bone and swirled pink down the drain. The humming and the bomb came back, before that or after it or maybe both. 

Then he’d woken up in this room. Barely any details registered at first: it took several awakenings before he could stay conscious for more than a few seconds. Even when he could, there wasn’t much to see. It was a sterile white hospital room, impossible to place or differentiate from any other hospital room in the country. He was wearing soft cottons pajamas, hooked up to four different monitors and three IVs. His hands were cuffed to the safety railings that had been lifted and he couldn’t feel his legs at all—but none of that felt unfamiliar, which meant he must be safe or at least safe enough, and it was so very easy to drift away again instead.

“When will they resume the tests?” 

The voice floated in from the hallway, young and friendly, probably a nurse.

For some reason Charles flinched, and one of the monitors let out an unhappy series of beeps. He closed his eyes, tried to breathe through his nose, to keep listening.

“As soon as he can communicate like someone who hasn’t had their brain put through a Cuisinart and use his telepathy without flatlining,” another voice answered.

“You think that’s gonna be any time soon?” the first said, lower, like this was some kind of secret. Charles strained to hear better, wondering why this felt so important.

“I don’t know.” The second voice sounded grim. “These freaks _are_ basically human, and humans have limits. They may have pushed this one too far with all those drugs. Then again, he held up for a good long time. Maybe he’ll bounce back.”

“And what about his…” The voice drifted off, implying a question.

“I’ll just say this. I wouldn’t want to be around that son of a bitch without a helmet right now. Wouldn’t be safe for me or for him.”

They moved down the hallway, voices fading with distance, and Charles realized that at some point all his muscles had seized up with no command from his brain, like a mouse froze when it sensed a hawk nearby. It hurt: there was still unexplained damage to his ribs, soreness in his abdominals like he had spent hours vomiting, a kind of post-flu lethargy that had seeped into his muscles, bones, and deeper still, somewhere beyond the physical. Muscle group by muscle group he forced himself to relax. Absently he twisted his wrists in their padded handcuffs; the repetitive motion was soothing. 

A tiny, curious corner of his mind turned those overheard words over, examining them for meaning that had escaped him in the moment. Tests, telepathy, drugs, limits—there was something there, something he needed to know or had known. He wondered if it had anything to do with the strange force he could feel coiled his head, motionless but humming with kinetic energy. It felt somehow unnatural to have it confined to his skull—like it was some kind of living creature, meant to be out in the world—but the idea of wakening it was so terrible that his mind shied away from it. Whatever it was, he couldn’t control it; better to leave it slumbering, so it couldn’t hurt him or anyone else. 

He was building high mental walls around _it_ when there were fast steps in the hallway, and before he even had time to tense up again one of his nurses had rushed into the room. Charles let out an involuntary squeak of distress at the sudden movement, then another when it hit him—she wasn’t wearing a helmet.

And she was staring at him like he was real, like he was important, like she _cared_. She hadn’t ever looked at him like that. None of them had. Charles shrank back, uncertain.

“Charles?” she said. She sounded different, wrong…sad?

“Yes.” He tried to sound more sure of the fact that he was. “Yes, I’m Charles.”

“Shit, Charles, what did these bastards _do_ to you?”

Charles giggled—he’d never heard any of the doctors or nurses curse, or get upset, or be anything but polite and brusque. The nurse didn’t seem to get the joke; in fact, she looked even more worried.

“Okay,” she said. “You’re going to be okay, Charles, I promise. You hear me? We’re here now.”

She seemed genuinely upset so he nodded to placate her, but instead of leaving him alone she moved quickly to his bedside. As she crossed the room, her eyes flickered from green to gold, her hair grew shorter and redder, and her skin rippled from smooth bronze to blue scales with a rushing sound like an entire flock of birds taking flight. She reached for one of his cuffed hands with that same sad smile and it took him an extra few seconds to flinch away, enraptured by the inexplicable sight of the most familiar stranger he’d ever seen.

“Oh,” he said, breathless and suddenly close to tears for no reason he could name. 

“I know,” the blue girl agreed, her gold eyes shining. “I know, Charles. I missed you too. We’ll deal with the rest of it later. Now it’s time to go.”

As if on cue, a series of crashes and bangs echoed down the hall, broken glass and screeching metal reverberating off the walls in a cacophonous wave of sound that swept over and burst their bubble of calm. Charles whimpered and twisted his wrists helplessly, trying to get away with nowhere to go, and the blue girl stroked his hair and shushed him like he was a fussy child. Then noise from the hall cut off abruptly, and instead agonized screams ripped through the air for a moment before they were choked off with ominous suddenness. 

“It’s okay,” the blue girl said reassuringly. “He’s here to help. No one’s going to stop us taking you away from here.”

“Make it stop, please make it stop,” Charles begged.

“It’s over, it’s over,” she promised. Then, in an angry shout: “ _Erik!_ In here, _now!_ ”

And an avenging angel appeared in the doorway.

He was beautiful in the graceful, untamed way predators were beautiful and in the refined, noble way Greek gods were beautiful. He radiated power and menace and protective rage and all of it, somehow, was directed straight at Charles. The stranger’s chest heaved as if he’d just climbed a mountain, his ginger hair shining under the fluorescent lights and his pale gray eyes fixed on Charles like nothing else in the world existed. Charles stared up at him through tears—of fear, confusion, exhaustion, he didn’t know—and didn’t understand how someone could simultaneously inspire a shock of fear and a warmth that spread through him like a warm blanket draped around his shoulders. It felt like safety. The handcuffs rattled against the railing as he pulled at them, wanting desperately to reach out and draw the man closer. Why didn’t matter; he only knew that he needed to do it like he needed to breathe.

The man gestured once and the cuffs fell away. Charles jumped, shocked, and then did just as he’d meant to: he reached out and waited.

The man crossed the room in three massive, ground-eating strides and took Charles’s hand, using the other to carefully trace the burns on his temples, the bruise-purple bags under his eyes, brushing away his tears with a gentle thumb. A grimace crossed his face, like his heart was causing him physical pain, but it vanished so quickly Charles wondered if he hadn’t imagined it. 

“Oh,” he gasped again.

“I don’t think he remembers us, Erik,” the blue girl said, voice quavering despite an obvious attempt to sound calm and collected.

The man blinked, which Charles somehow knew telegraphed a level of surprise that would have most men leaping out of their seats. “Do you know who I am, Charles?” 

“I’m not sure,” Charles said truthfully. He had lied to doctors and nurses without a second thought, but the idea of lying now seemed absurd.

All the metal in the room shivered for a moment, but the reassuring expression on the other man’s face never wavered. “I’m Erik, and this is Raven. We’re friends. We’ve come to take you home.”

“You’re not wearing helmets.” That seemed important, especially if they were leaving the hospital. They might not have helmets, in the outside world.

“No, Charles,” Erik said. “We trust you.”

“I’m not sure you should,” Charles said doubtfully. “Everyone wears them.”

Erik and Raven exchanged alarmed glances heavy with a significance Charles didn’t understand. 

“When was the last time you saw someone who didn’t?” Erik asked.

Charles frowned, though even now, with an inexplicable rush of cold anxiety down his spine, he couldn’t bring himself to look away from Erik’s face. His eyes weren’t really gray at all—they were green, maybe, or blue when he tilted his head a certain way. There was a scar above his lip that Charles wanted to trace with his index finger, so he did, but he was hardly surprised when Erik pulled his hand away gently, silently telling him to focus. Charles chewed his lower lip and _tried_ , but his mind skittered away every time he reached further back than the white of this room. The water that had turned pink after touching his clothes, that meant something. Had something else washed away too, something invisible? He remembered a foreign stickiness, something dark and greasy and unpleasant that had clung to his skin or maybe his thoughts, but he hadn’t _seen_ anyone. He wasn’t entirely sure he could trust his eyesight anyway—he saw things that weren’t there, visual echoes of memories that weren’t his, but if Erik was asking it must be important—

“Come back, Charles. We’ll talk about it later. I need you to calm down and hold still now.” Erik was holding his face firmly in both hands, forcing eye contact that shouldn’t have been as soothing as it was, and as Charles’s involuntary shivers subsided the needles in his IVs slid free more smoothly than they’d gone in; he barely felt it.

“Hank says we don’t have a lot of time,” Raven said quietly. 

Erik nodded. “Time to go, then. Ready, Charles?”

“No,” Charles said, but he managed a small smile to let Erik know he was joking. Erik smiled back, though his was sadder, and lifted Charles out of the hospital bed like he weighed nothing. Charles couldn’t feel the arm under his knees but the long fingers splayed against his back felt comforting. It never occurred to him to protest the fact that he was being kidnapped.

Raven leading the way, they moved through the facility quickly. Charles wanted to look around, curious at the unfamiliar surroundings, but even more than that he wanted not to see evidence of the destructive swath Erik had cut through the place in what looked like single-minded determination to do as much damage as possible. Doors had been yanked off their hinges and crumpled like tin foil; the overhead fluorescent lights swung from a handful of broken wires; shards of glass crunched underfoot; pieces of desks and chairs and lab equipment and tables and file cabinets were strewn across every hallway. Worse than that, though, were the bodies with their white coats stained red and limbs twisted grotesquely, slumped like discarded marionettes. And so much blood—more blood than the human body could hold, surely, still spreading in lakes across the linoleum. The stench of it filled the air. Charles gagged and pressed his face into Erik’s neck instead, breathing in the smell of sweat and soap and leather. It was too hard to reconcile the man who had wreaked such havoc with the man who held him so gently, so he simply didn’t try. Charles was used to things not making sense.

“I had to,” Erik said softly. “They took you, Charles. They had to know I couldn’t allow that.”

Charles shook his head, though in his current position it was more like a nuzzle. “Why?”

“You know why. You just don’t remember right now.”

“Okay,” Charles sighed, unconcerned.

Then they were stepping into the sunlight and there was a screech of rubber on pavement and a third voice harsh with anxiety. Raven answered, but it was so much nicer to focus on the soft surface Erik laid him down on than the unhappy voices talking over each other above him. Doors slammed and they lurched into motion again.

Charles pulled his unfeeling legs towards his chest and curled his upper body in on itself, his head resting on Erik’s thigh and one hand twisted in the material of his pant leg. His vision blurred slightly so he closed his eyes, trying to ignore the intermittent shivers that still shook him at unpredictable intervals. That _thing_ in his mind quivered too, pulsing against the barriers he’d erected around it. So much excitement. Perhaps if he drifted just a little…someone would wake him, if anything important happened. Erik hadn’t relaxed at all: the muscles under Charles’s head were rigid with tension, even if the fingers that carded through his tangled hair were impossibly gentle and Erik’s occasional, softly-accented whispers too soft for anyone but Charles to hear.

“Rest, we’re taking you somewhere safe…it would be you, you were always the best of us…it’s over now, none of them will ever touch you again…you’re in there somewhere, _schatz_ , I know you are…”

“I hope you're real. Please don't be a dream,” Charles slurred, hovering on the edge of consciousness. If Erik said anything in response, he didn’t hear it.


	7. Erik and Charles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik rampages like, a lot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to all who reminded me that the story I was thinking of was Dark Flowers! I've decided to keep going with this anyway. There's no such thing as too many rescue fics :)

As the sun set, Erik, Raven, and Hank stood on a hill somewhere near the Canadian border in the northeast corner of New York State. Anyone looking out a south-facing window from the facility below would have spotted them, but when Hank had pointed out their exposed position Erik had growled, “The time for subtlety is over—let them see” which had made Raven smile approvingly and Hank heave an aggrieved sigh. Neither disagreed, though.

For the first time in several long minutes Erik opened his eyes and let the hand that been stretched towards the facility fall to his side. With the other he massaged his forehead, blinking several times as his metal-sense withdrew to his immediate surroundings and traditional vision reasserted dominance over his perception.

“It’s all concrete above-ground,” he said, disgusted. “Minimal metal in the struts and beams, wood any place they could use it. They’ve converted and expanded a nuclear fallout shelter underneath. The floors belowground are steel and go down at least ten levels, but I can’t touch them without causing structural damage to the first floor.”

“So we can’t just lift the roof off the place, is what you’re saying,” Raven translated.

Erik shook his head grimly. “I’m afraid not.”

“All right, we’ll go in the old-fashioned way.” Raven, busy running possible scenarios in her head, didn’t look nearly as put out as Erik felt, but then she was nothing if not adaptable. “If he’s on the first floor you’ve got less ammunition but we’ll find him fast, and if he’s on one of the lower levels the whole place is your playground.”

Erik raised an eyebrow and Hank looked up, both a little surprised by how casual she sounded. Hank squatted on the ground making last-minute adjustments to several slapdash devices he had cobbled from parts of the ones he’d designed for Allenwood, which he’d explained would allow him to crash the whole facility’s independent electrical grid and its backup generator. With the place thrown into chaos, hopefully Raven and Erik could slip in and find Charles with no one the wiser, or at least get a good head start on any pursuers. After another dose of the serum, he could manipulate the delicate wires and circuits himself; much as he hated being left out, he’d kept his protests half-hearted, knowing that nothing in the world would convince Erik to stay on the sidelines this time. 

“You make it sound like a game of whack-a-mole, Raven,” he said, trying and failing not to sound reproachful. 

Raven cocked her head with the deliberate nonchalance of a predator toying with prey that had no chance of escape. Hank swallowed loudly, sensing he had waded into dangerous water, but forged ahead anyway. “I just mean, not everyone in there even knows about Charles, probably, this is highly classified stuff, and he wouldn’t want—”

Raven moved so fast her limbs blurred, and when she went still again it was crouched on her toes in front of Hank with her fingers gripping his chin so hard his already-pale skin whitened even further. “I don’t give a damn what he would want. He doesn’t get a vote because he’s been in there with those bastards for _weeks_ and you don’t get to deputize yourself as his proxy. Just because I’m not sitting here wringing my hands helplessly doesn’t mean I’m not taking this seriously. And if you think I’ll show mercy to _anyone_ who’s had a hand in this—well, you might not want to listen in too closely.”

Erik was on the brink of telling her that was enough when she picked up two of the wireless earbuds and stood up, handing one to him and keeping the other for herself. Left behind as she stalked away, he helped Hank to his feet and then squeezed his shoulder. Something in either action must have been enough to convey encouragement and trust, because Hank looked less like a kicked puppy, visibly straightened up, and even attempted a smile.

“Go on then,” he said. “I’ll give you ten minutes to get in position and then cut the power. Be ready to move, fast.”

Erik nodded. “We’ll see you soon. All three of us.”

He caught up with Raven halfway down the hill, waited for her to speak first. After a hundred more feet she flashed him a sharp grin and something that resembled a shrug. “You think teamwork is like riding a bicycle? Because I am way out of practice.”

“Not in the slightest,” Erik said.

“You were supposed to be the short fuse, not me.”

“Don’t kid yourself, I still am,” Erik said, and Raven laughed. When she bumped his shoulder companionably he didn’t flinch at all, but only because the sensation didn’t register: he’d reached out with his metal-sense again, honing in on trace amounts of iron and steel in the building’s skeleton that he had missed at a distance. And something else, not solid metal but lots of ferrous components in an extremely concentrated area, possibly a single room—the bank of elevators to the lower levels had overshadowed it on his first sweep, but from this new angle it was unmistakable. Whatever else was underground, there was a laboratory on the first floor.

“This way,” Erik said, redirecting their approach. “There’s a lab in the southwest quadrant. If he’s not there he’s probably close by.”

They had only just rounded the perimeter to the closest entrance when a strange noise—a combination of a buzz and a hiss, like a can of soda being opened but amplified—echoed from inside the building, and every light in the handful of visible windows went dark. There was no mistaking Hank’s work. Raven looked at him for orders and Erik was struck by the absurd thought that he ought to say something inspiring, a dramatic monologue that involved buzzwords like “brotherhood,” “oppressors,” “justice,” and “freedom.” He always had made his best speeches on the spur of the moment. Yet somehow he knew that he would choke on the words this time, that justice was a farce and freedom was a joke and the benefit of mutantkind had nothing to do with why he was here. Words were futile, more futile than he had ever realized; action was the only speech that mattered. So, silent, he lifted a perfectly steady hand and the chain-link fence around the facility tore itself open, the nearest door flying off its hinges as they approached. 

The halls were empty and drenched in shadows. Erik preferred it that way: these places were all alike, sanitized and blindingly white and interchangeable, too familiar after ten years of the same. He barricaded the panic-inducing thought of going deep underground again in a corner of his mind to deal with later and led the way unerringly, drawn toward the lab like he’d magnetized himself to it, his blood to the scalpels that had touched Charles’s.

Because he could, because there was a sour taste in his mouth and the heaviness that had weighed him down for days had been replaced by a sensation half in his head and half somewhere near his diaphragm that felt like falling, Erik opened the lab doors by blasting them halfway across the room. He could tell from fifty feet away that there was no one inside—though there were pounding feet and raised voices several hallways over—but Hank would need to know what had been done to Charles, in case he wasn’t capable of telling them himself.

And Erik had his own reasons, too.

“Find him,” he told Raven. “I’ll be right behind you.”

As her footsteps faded away, he walked further into the lab. All his senses were hyper-attuned, straining against the limitations of his body. He could feel machines in an adjoining room, silent now but still warm. There were two chairs in the main room, modified to include specialized restraints and surrounded by medical equipment, and the smell of bleach that hung heavy in the air was strongest around them, so strong his eyes watered with it. Whatever had happened here had required extensive cleanup after the fact. Even so, they’d missed a few spots; he could sense the iron in several drops of dried blood on the floor.

There was a desk and filing cabinets on the far side of the lab. Erik rifled through the drawers and picked the files that on cursory inspection mentioned mutations, telepathy, or Xavier, Charles. Anything that would help Hank piece together what had happened—

There was a sudden gasp from the doorway, and when Erik wheeled around there was a boy in a white lab coat staring at him. 

When he took in whatever expression was on Erik’s face the kid tried to bolt, but not fast enough to escape the thin noose that had formerly been the clip of his ID badge. As the boy clawed at the metal around his neck, feet kicking in midair, the crude leash dragged him back and across the room to where Erik waited, ominously serene.

“I’ve come for Charles Xavier,” he said, tightening the metal until the technician stopped babbling nonsense and went still, dangling six inches above the ground. “Do you know what that means?”

The kid shook his head frantically. He was young, younger than Charles had been when they first met, and Erik waited for that knowledge to inspire some flash of compassion, some spark of mercy. Instead there was only a clinical dispassion.

“It means you’re the first, but you won’t be the last. Whatever you did to him, however you tried to break him, Charles Xavier will outlive you all.”

Erik grabbed the files and went back to the doorway, leaving the boy dangling in the middle of the room by the collar around his neck. He forced his breathing to steady. Everything was happening so quickly. Even as part of him knew exactly what to do, from some ingrained muscle memory he would have lost over ten years if he hadn’t spent the twenty before that honing it, there was a part of him that felt small and overwhelmed, that wanted nothing more than to take Charles and run until the two of them were unreachable by the rest of the world. But to do that now would be to leave this lab and the facility that housed it and the people that ran it whole, safe, and unpunished. That he couldn’t allow. Even if justice was a farce, he could give Charles vengeance.  
   
Starting here. Erik let his metal-sense settle into every piece of steel and iron and copper in the lab as he calmed his mind. He imagined the surface of his thoughts placid and smooth, and then he allowed some of the worst moments of his life to float to the surface as poisonous bubbles and burst. Noxious memories of the lab Schmidt had used, dark and dank and filled with rusted knives and saws, not nearly as bright and _cheerful_ as this one. The lab somewhere under the Pentagon where he used to wake up sometimes, confused, not knowing if they’d put the sedative in his food, water, or air this time. And the words he’d read only a moment ago in a file labeled _Xavier, Charles: Experiments 1-17_ that referred to the best man he’d ever known as “the subject” and included exact dosages and extensive notes on side effects in a precise, clinical hand. “10 mg IV heroin @ 1200 and 1400 hrs.” “Subject febrile, severe lethargy, heightened emotional response.” Every inhumane thing they had done to him, written down proudly, for posterity.  
   
It was easy as breathing, with those memories held foremost in his mind, to tear the lab apart. He reduced every complex machine to individual nuts and bolts, smashed the tables and chairs to pieces against the walls, sent a hail of razor-sharp blades through the rest of the files, set a hurricane of metallic shards spinning around the terrified technician. Then he went in search of Raven.  
   
Halfway down the hall, he clenched his fist tightly. In the lab the metal collar tightened too, and all the objects in the air hit the floor at once.  
   
Even with the chaos of the ongoing power outage, the racket he’d made had drawn attention. He didn’t make it a hundred feet before another white coat attempted to stop and question him, and they came fast after that. He didn’t even bother to pause, or get a good look at any of their faces. Slowing down enough to take them out by hand would have wasted time and the anger that had triggered his metallokinesis had been nowhere near slaked by the lab’s destruction; it was so easy now to turn their own glasses, clipboards, and pens against them, and he’d already forgotten each crumpled body by the time it hit the floor.  
   
“Erik! In here, _now_!”

He registered Raven’s scream only enough to change course; it took the sight of Charles to cut through the static in his head. For a long moment he stood frozen in the doorway, gasping, staring. There was a series of crashes behind him as his anger drained away in an instant—trying to get it back was like trying to grab spilled water, and what did it matter anyway, when Charles looked so frightened of him?

The last time Charles had looked at him like this had been Cuba, only this was infinitely worse because there had been sharp judgment too, in Cuba, and Erik had deserved it, and now those blue eyes were so—empty. Charles was tearful, afraid, but Erik was willing to bet Charles himself didn’t know why, or why he was pulling at the restraints around his wrists, trying to reach out and shrink away at the same time. He had seen this kind of emptiness in the eyes of traumatized men before, had read enough of _Xavier, Charles: Experiments 1-17_ to know that there were some chemical cocktails that simply couldn’t be resisted. The damage was clear, and the part of Erik’s mind that had learned how to clinically assess a mark for weaknesses psychological and physical whispered that they might have come too late. 

Just as well that made no difference, really, in the end. Even if Charles was a ticking time bomb there was nothing that could stop Erik from shattering the restraints and taking the unsteady hand held out to him. Charles summoned him, he went. It was practically an elemental truth.

“Oh,” Charles said softly, wonderingly, as Erik wiped his tears, caressed skin still red with poorly-healed burns and scars, tucked his tangled hair away from his face. Surely human contact should have triggered him the way it did Erik but he was leaning into it instead, eyes closed, his frightened whimpers fading into steady breaths again. Not wanting to test the limits of that acceptance, Erik kept his touches light and gentle, resisting the possessive urge to wrap his entire body around Charles’s emaciated frame and prove to him that every inch of his body was real. 

“I don’t think he remembers us, Erik,” Raven said shakily. 

Charles looked at her, affectionate but uncomprehending, and then back at Erik.

“Do you know who I am, Charles?” Erik asked. He kept his voice low, unthreatening. 

“I’m not sure,” Charles whispered.

His agitation rattled the room for a few seconds before Erik brought himself under control. The last thing Charles needed was to associate either of them with violence, especially if it was difficult for him to understand that they were here to rescue him and not make things worse. It was already a miracle he’d remained so calm for so long. “I’m Erik, and this is Raven. We’re friends. We’ve come to take you home.”

“You’re not wearing helmets.”

“No, Charles. We trust you,” Erik said, nearly certain that wasn’t a lie. He hoped his guilt didn’t show on his face; he _had_ worn one, for so long before his arrest, and when he hadn’t he had wanted it back more than anything because he’d been so certain that his human jailers could only hold him so long, and they could only do so much damage to his body, but Charles could hold his mind permanently and he would never know it or, worse, know it and love it. And then the treasured memory of that moment in Washington when Charles had taken control of his body and powers had made it impossible to deny that that worst case scenario was one he’d craved at least as often as he’d dreaded it, and he’d worn the helmet to prevent himself from reaching out for Charles at least as much as to prevent the reverse.

But now they sat inches apart, their minds bare to each other and Erik’s fingers literally pressed against Charles’s temple, and he couldn’t feel the slightest hint of Charles in his mind. Instead, the telepath’s brow merely furrowed with innocent concern. 

“I’m not sure you should. Everyone wears them.”

“When was the last time you saw someone who didn’t?” Erik asked. 

Raven looked at him, less adept at hiding her alarm. Being cut off from a physical mutation had been disconcerting enough, but Charles’s was so deeply engrained in his psyche that cutting it off seemed unimaginable.

Charles’s frown deepened like he didn’t understand the question. He opened his mouth, hesitated, and then reached out for Erik’s face instead, tracing it like a blind man learning what someone looked like for the first time. His stare was fixed and unblinking, his pupils dilated from something in one of the several IVs in his wrists and arms, and when Erik reluctantly pulled away it seemed to turn inward. There was a long moment of silence that reminded Erik of his time under the Pentagon—the kind of howling silence that fell when thoughts and memories were too painful to be spoken aloud but impossible to escape—and then Charles began to shake and whimper again, muttering something about water under his breath. It was awful to watch, and even more awful to see Charles in such pain and feel no telepathic bleedover, when Charles had always leaked his headaches, his happiness, his hunger. 

“Hank says we don’t have a lot of time,” Raven said suddenly.

Erik nodded in acknowledgement and continued to murmur soothing nonsense words as he pulled all the metal free of Charles’s body and melted it into pools of nothing on the floor. “Time to go, then. Ready, Charles?”

“No,” Charles said, but he seemed steadier now, more present, and the shadow of a smile he gave Erik was more beautiful than anything in a place this ugly should have been.

Time, which seemed to have slowed, sped up quickly after that. He lifted Charles in his arms, felt the telepath struggle to wrap his arms around his neck and then relax so completely that only the occasional flutter of his eyelashes betrayed the fact that he was still conscious at all, and followed Raven back down the dark hallways. It wasn’t dark enough to hide the evidence of the chaos he had wrought his first pass through the facility and Raven gave him a look over her shoulder that clearly said _Really, Erik?_ as she sidestepped two bodies and a pool of blood. Still, Erik appreciated that she said nothing aloud that would have alerted Hank to the destruction and earned them both a lecture. Charles didn’t say anything either but he did wrinkle his nose at the smell and turn the top half of his body more fully into Erik’s chest, inhaling his scent instead.

“I had to. They took you, Charles. They had to know I couldn’t allow that,” Erik told him. He was so accustomed to justifying his actions to Charles, even knowing he would never truly understand, that it didn’t occur to him until he was done that Charles hadn’t asked, hadn’t voiced any disapproval at all. The messiness of it seemed to displease him more than the violence, and instead of disagreeing with Erik he simply made a vague questioning noise.

“You know why,” Erik reassured him, since Charles was in no state to comprehend the real answer. “You just don’t remember right now.”

“Okay,” Charles agreed, and laid his head back down on Erik’s shoulder again.

Raven must have told Hank to be ready, because the getaway van was waiting outside the same door Erik had blown off its hinges at the beginning of the mission. Hank clutched the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands and stared at Charles with such naked worry on his face that Erik tightened his grip resolutely and scowled, his distrust belied only by the files he tossed into Raven’s lap once he had Charles settled in the back seat. Hank and Raven had brought him into this and he’d played along nicely so far, but they were gravely mistaken if they thought he would leave Charles in their hands and what—go back to Florida? Back to the Brotherhood? While Charles was in this state? Not a chance in hell, he thought, resting one hand over Charles’s hip and stroking his hair with the other. They wouldn’t be rid of him so easily, now that they had accomplished their mission.

But that was a conversation for later. Now, anchored by the telepath’s too-quick heartbeat and the iron in his blood, Erik reached his metal-sense back to the facility, already rapidly fading into the distance. He felt out the most crucial support struts in the lower levels, wrapped his powers around steel beams and iron joints, and yanked it all up, up, until it broke the surface and exploded out the concrete roof the facility like a volcano erupting solid metal. 

“I do hope you’re not a dream. Please be real,” Charles mumbled.

Erik watched him until he fell asleep, wracked with guilt but unable to kill the hope that he would get to keep this, a Charles who didn’t hate him, just a little longer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Audience poll please? I can't decide whether to continue this from Charles' or Erik's POV and writing each chapter twice seems unsustainable. Is one better than the other? Which do you guys prefer?


	8. Charles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> comfort comfort comfort HURT

“We can’t give him the serum. We can’t give him anything. His system is like toxic chemical soup right now, there could be side effects—”

“Hank, you read those files. You know what they were trying to do. What if he wakes up here, doesn’t remember it _or_ us, and does exactly what they wanted him to?”

“He wouldn’t. You said he was confused but rational. Responsive. That means he’s still _him_ , and he wouldn’t, ever.”

“Not on purpose! It wouldn’t be his fault. But it would be idiotic not to think about the worst case scenario.”

“If we give him the serum while his telepathy is unstable, who’s to say it won’t cripple it permanently?”

“Hank’s right. There’s been too much strain put on his powers already. They need to heal too.”

“Then there is the—”

“No. That’s not an option.”

“You’re such a hypocrite, Erik. It used to be nonnegotiable.”

The familiar voices had begun to rise in volume and pitch, sharpening as a whispered discussion became a hissed argument. Charles blinked once, twice, but must have fallen asleep again between the two because when he opened his eyes again the room was silent and empty. His head felt weighed down, like someone had shoveled wet concrete into it while he slept, and it took phenomenal effort to turn his head from one side of the pillow to the other. 

Yet something about that simple gesture was a blissful relief. 

For some equally mysterious reason his next impulse was to raise his hands. Nothing happened. There was pressure bearing down on them, soft but heavy. He tried again, but his atrophied muscles had the strength of rubber bands and there was already sweat breaking out on his forehead from the effort—or from the jolt like electricity that hit him as his mind came to the only logical conclusion: restraints. Again. Always. The doctors had said something about new tests…But he had thought—he remembered—

“Charles? Charles, calm down, you’ll hurt yourself.” Familiar hands tugged at the thick blankets draped over him, stripped away the heavy duvet, loosened the sheets that had somehow become twisted around him. Then the same fingers lifted his, making sure not to touch his wrists or restrain him in any way, merely showing him that with the covers pulled down to his waist he had complete freedom of movement. “It was just blankets, see? Too many blankets. That’s all.”

“Erik,” Charles said, hating that he sounded so breathless, so weak still, or perhaps again. He knew that Erik would never let himself be seen like this, and it felt important to be as strong as Erik, even if he had no idea why that was.

“Hello,” Erik said, smiling with some of his mouth and all of his eyes. Trying not to make it sound like a question, he still couldn’t strip all the uncertainty from his voice when he said, “You recognize me.”

“You’re in my dreams,” Charles told him, like that made the answer obvious. 

Erik frowned, not understanding. He looked very tired, Charles thought. Unsure of his basis for comparison, he was nevertheless certain that Erik usually had some kind of barely-leashed intensity that seemed to be missing. From the state of his hair and stubble he hadn’t showered in a few days; maybe he hadn’t been sleeping either. Moving slowly, as if unsure of his welcome, he sat down on the edge of the bed and rested a hand that Charles couldn’t feel somewhere near his knee. “What dreams?”

“Sometimes during tests I go away for a while, and you’ll be there, you and Raven. You come and you stop them. You kill them all and take me away.”

“We did, Charles. It wasn’t just a dream. It happened. They’re dead and you’re home, in Westchester.”

Westchester sounded like a real place, a familiar place. Again, Charles turned his head from one side of the pillow to the other, this time taking in his surroundings. He was in a bedroom that might have been designed as the diametric opposite of the white room—hunter-green wallpaper, scattered paintings of bucolic landscapes, all mahogany furniture, solid and expensive. Through a door by the antique desk he glimpsed a large marble-accented bathroom with a shower and tub. There were balcony doors flung open on the other side of the room, leading out to a sunlit terrace where a cup of tea and a book rested near an armchair that looked like it had been dragged out from the bedroom. Erik must have come inside when he heard Charles struggling, but that didn’t explain why he was here in the first place. Erik didn’t like Westchester, did he? The sight of him here, flushed from the sun with his shirt rolled up to his elbows, felt wrong and right simultaneously, a feeling Charles couldn’t parse at all. 

“I’m not sure I believe you,” Charles said doubtfully. “This feels just like one of my dreams and I heard them say there were be more tests. Once I…‘can use my telepathy without flatlining,’ they said.”

Charles could see Erik’s knuckles go white even if he couldn’t feel the grip on his leg tighten and for a moment he was worried Erik would yell at him. That wasn’t supposed to happen—Erik was always so gentle in his dreams, reserving that teutonic rage for the others, the ones Charles couldn’t remember much about except that they all wore lab coats and called the tests “experiments,” and Erik hated experiments on other mutants. In fact, all his memories of the tests were fuzzy, like they had happened a long time ago, or to someone else.

Instead all Erik’s anger drained out of him the moment he noticed Charles’s nervousness, and he nearly flung himself off the bed in his haste to put distance between them. He sounded disgusted with himself. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t you, it was them, I shouldn’t have killed them so quickly. They should have suffered far more, far longer—”

Charles sighed and leaned back against the pillows again, determined to enjoy every moment of this respite from reality even if Erik couldn’t. He could feel the summer breeze drifting in through the open doors, the smell of fresh-cut grass so different from the chemical disinfectant in the white room and…before. His ribs and wrists were bandaged, his skin free of grime and sweat, silk striped pajamas felt heavenly on his bruises; even the headache that had plagued him as far back as he could remember had softened to a bearable twinge, and the pulsing force in his head was quiet. He heard the frenetic pacing cease, a moment of hesitation.

“Hank should know you’re awake.”

He sighed again, more theatrically this time. “Oh, for God’s sake, I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here, will you just stop being so dramatic and come back?”

Erik approached the bed again cautiously, as if he expected Charles to change his mind with every step. “You want me to stay?”

“Of course,” Charles said. When he patted the empty mattress to his right—the bed was so enormous, there was no need to for anyone to perch penitently on the edge—Erik climbed up and settled with his back against the headboard a few inches further away than arm’s length, long legs and bare feet stretched out in front of him. He looked almost comically bewildered.

“Why?” he asked.

“I’m sorry?”

“You think you’re dreaming. You believe that you’ll wake up and they’ll be torturing you again and in these few moments, these precious moments, you don’t want to see your sister, or Hank, or go outside, or eat a real meal. You want me to stay. I don’t understand how that can be.”

“Yes, well, you’ve always been rather thick,” Charles said. 

Erik was so taken aback that a bark of laughter escaped him before he could stop it. Charles managed to keep a straight face at that, but even his best poker face couldn’t last against Erik’s expression of total consternation immediately afterwards, which seemed largely composed of abject horror that he’d dared to feel a positive emotion while Charles was in such a state. Only when he saw that Charles had been joking—albeit somewhat clumsily—did he drop the self-flagellation. 

“Only you would forget everything else and remember to insult me, Charles,” he said ruefully. 

Charles turned over on his side, rearranging his lower half manually, and reshuffled the pillows so that he could look up at Erik without straining his neck. He was exhausted in a way that transcended physical tiredness. It hadn’t even occurred to him to ask for Raven or Hank, and feeling the sunlight on his skin or eating food that didn’t come in an IV sounded nice in the abstract way that walking sounded nice—the stuff of fantasies, impossible dreams that hurt all the more for dwelling on them. But this, lying in a comfortable bed while Erik not only didn’t hurt him but actually treated him gently instead, in just enough residual pain to be confident his mind hadn’t snapped entirely, was as close to perfect as he had ever expected to experience again. For however long he got to keep this, he would hoard it jealously.

“I thought you were a dream at first too,” Erik said. “At the Pentagon with that boy and the man from the future. For ten years I imagined what it would be like when you came for me, every little detail. And then you did, and you were walking, you were so angry with me, and I knew it couldn’t be true because those were the things I’d wanted most of all.”

“You wanted me to be angry?” Charles asked, not mentioning how nice Erik’s fingers felt carding through his now-washed hair in case that made him stop.

“What’s the point of yelling at someone if they won’t yell back? I had a decade of resentments that I kept hidden from every stupid human who tried to make me lose my temper. I was saving them for you.”

Only Erik would think of his hatred as a kind of gift, Charles reflected, but there was no bitterness to the thought. It was difficult to summon bitterness about anything; even the conviction that this was nothing more than a fantastical mirage and he could wake to a living nightmare any second inspired determination to exist only in this moment. He had no wish to claw his way back to reality so soon, the way Erik would—or the way he _thought_ Erik would. This softer, quieter shadow of Erik didn’t look ready to claw his way anywhere. He seemed content to just…talk.

“Tell me about them,” Charles said. “Your resentments, the ones you saved for me.”

Erik sighed heavily, pretending to be far more put out than he was. “The food was terrible, for one. No flavor at all, terrible oatmeal. The jumpsuits always itched. Abysmal selection of reading material…I must have read Dr. Spock and the same dime store romance novels a hundred times. Why it took the barmaid two hundred pages to uncover the cowboy’s secret identity _every time_ is beyond me.”

“You could have written better,” Charles said, daring to tease a little.

“I _did_ , in my head. Too dangerous to be trusted with a pencil, apparently. That was years ago, somewhere else, before they moved me to the Pentagon. It was always cold there. The shower was a spigot over a drain in the corner of the bathroom, impossible to use without flooding the place. The towels were like sandpaper. And the lights were so bright…I got snow blindness once, in Russia, it wasn’t so different. They didn’t turn off the lights for days at first. I punched a wall so I could look at my hands and see blood and bruises, to remember what colors looked like.”

He held up his left hand, smiled a little. “You’d never know.”

Charles frowned, not eager to remember his own white room or the restraints that had kept him from lashing out in the same way. He asked the first question that came to mind. “What convinced you it wasn’t a dream?”

“Time,” Erik said. “Some days I wake up and I’m still not sure. But time helps. Time and using my powers. When that’s the thing they want, the thing they take away from you…reclaiming it is the best way to reclaim your reality.”

“You’re very smart,” Charles said. “Show me.”

Erik looked down at him, surprised, and then reached out to the ornate lamp, gilded in gold and no doubt terribly expensive, on the desk across the room. As Charles watched, the lamp began to spin in place and the gold peeled off the frame, long strips hovering in midair and then, one by one, drifting across the room as if blown by the softest breeze. For a moment Erik paused, considering, and then the metal suddenly seemed to turn liquid, reshaping itself into the form of a tiny golden cat with its tail curled around its legs and its ears pricked forward. The detail was exquisite, Charles saw as it floated down into his hand. He smiled up at Erik, who looked almost embarrassed now that his fierce concentration had dissipated.

“Thank you,” Charles said. “That’s very impressive.”

Erik shrugged. “I couldn’t have done it two months ago. Then again, I always was stronger around you.” He fell quiet for a moment, then continued with a seriousness that felt very different from the easy comradery of before, like he’d come to a decision about something. “You helped me understand my powers once, Charles. It’s time for me to return the favor. Come into my mind and tell me if I’m lying when I say that this isn’t a dream.”

“You’d never say that. You hate me being in your head,” Charles said quickly, hoping that his nervous laughter hid the sudden hitch in his breathing. He knew that much even if he didn’t quite know what Erik was talking about. Something ominous was trailing cold fingers up his spine; something about this subject was dangerous.

“That’s oversimplifying and you know it. I mean it, Charles. Come in and see the world through my eyes. You can do it.”

“I can’t,” Charles insisted. “I won’t. Erik, stop this.”

“You are stronger than what they did to you, Charles, I know you are,” Erik said fiercely. 

To escape the intense look on his face—some unbearable combination of faith and stubbornness and apprehension— Charles began the laborious process of shifting positions so he could turn his back but a hand on his shoulder stopped him easily. Of course it did; anyone could manhandle him these days, like they had every time they’d peeled his sweat-soaked skin off the chair and dragged him to the wet room, every time they’d dropped him on the floor of a shower stall and walked away knowing there was nothing he could do but lie there until they came back for him, every time they used the restraints or didn’t because his odds of escape were the same either way—

The rush of memory hurt, a tidal wave that subsumed and nearly drowned him before he fought his way back to the surface, and he hated Erik for making him remember in the only place it was safe to forget, a hatred mixed with confusion because he was no longer certain what was happening.

And even as he physically shook off the rest, that last thought of escape continued to scratch at the forefront of his mind. There was something there, something he was forgetting. Whatever it was made the dormant creature in his head stir restlessly, expanding and contracting like it breathed, or was trying to get out. He knew with absolute certainty that couldn’t be allowed to happen—which made it a very bad moment for Erik to touch his temple and send the invitation telepathically. He meant to do so gently, perhaps would have succeeded under other circumstances, but he was out of practice and Charles had no shields, no forewarning, and no control, and Erik’s message careened into his mind like a telepathic shriek. 

_COME IN CHARLES_

“Get _back_!” 

His voice resembled a child’s wail as Charles shoved Erik away with all the strength in his wasted body. At the same time, the force in his mind twitched and lashed out too, a single tendril like a bullwhip snapped straight from his mind into Erik’s. Charles could only watch, horrified, as Erik’s expression went blank with shock the microsecond before his eyes rolled back and he collapsed on the bed like a discarded plaything. 

And he couldn’t do anything at all as the same tendril of power snapped back to its source. An atomic bomb exploded whitely behind his eyes, and everything after that was black.


	9. Erik

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again I cannot thank garnettrees enough--she's an angel and an incredible writer who puts up with all my pestering and this story would be nonexistent without her

Erik woke up in the room he had claimed for himself the first day at the mansion, feeling like his brain had been pulverized and was at least halfway through leaking out of his ears. Before he even had time to remember what had happened, nausea hit him so hard and fast that he barely managed to lurch upright and would have thrown up all over himself if not for the trashcan that magically appeared just in time. When he’d finished heaving, he dizzily followed the blue fingers holding the trashcan up the blue arm to the blue shoulder to an incredibly unimpressed blue face.

“Thanks, Mystique.”

“You fucking idiot, he could have killed you,” Raven said.

Erik sank back against the pillows with a groan. As much as he wanted to go to the bathroom and brush his teeth to get the sour taste out of his mouth, the thought of moving any more than necessary to curl into the fetal position was painful, and even that would have to wait until his head stopped spinning. Something cold and wet landed on his chest, more thrown than tossed: a damp washcloth, he felt, draping it over his forehead. Without really processing Raven’s statement, he muttered, “Couldn’t have hurt worse than this.”

“It really could have,” she snapped. “What year is it and who’s the president?”

“1972, and an imbecile. You know, your bedside manner leaves something to be desired.”

“I’m not here to play nursemaid,” Raven said, even as she picked up the glass of water on the nightstand and sat on the edge of the bed, gently supporting Erik’s head as he drank. Then she folded the washcloth in half and dabbed his forehead with it, continued absently, “I’m here to make sure my brother didn’t telepathically lobotomize you. What were you two doing in there? Hank stuck his head in to check on you and found you both passed out.”

“ _Both_ passed out? Is he alright?” Erik’s eyes had drifted closed but now they snapped open, wide and worried. He could bear almost any pain himself, but if hurting him had hurt Charles—if he had managed to accidentally injure Charles, _again_ —well, all he knew for certain was that the idea of walking away from that particular mistake for a third time was intolerable. Charles would have to force him to go. 

Raven nodded. “Hank says he’ll be fine. No signs that it’s anything more than pushing himself too hard too fast. He needs the rest anyway.”

“I need to see him, I need to make sure,” Erik said, struggling to sit up again. Raven started to say something and then sighed heavily instead, watching as he maneuvered to the edge of the bed with painful slowness. He gritted his teeth against another wave of nausea and blinked several times, trying to clear his blurred vision. Even sitting down he was swaying, constantly off-balance with no concept of himself in relation to the floor, and it only got worse when he stood up. His vision was skipping like a bad television broadcast and with his depth perception shot each step came down too hard. Right when he thought he was going to fall over or throw up or both at once, Raven slipped an arm around his waist. She guided him as he tripped back to bed and collapsed like a dead weight, too dizzy to even lie down properly. 

“Okay, slugger, that’s enough. He can’t give you points for heroic behavior he’s not awake to see.”

“Not that,” Erik groaned into the blanket. He hadn’t managed to collapse anywhere near a pillow. “Make sure he’s not hurt.”

“I told you, he’s fine. Telepathic overexertion always did a number on him. It just didn’t take much, this time around. But since you’re still alive and basically coherent, maybe he’s not as bad off as we thought he was.”

Raven had pushed the hardest to put some kind of barrier between Charles’s mind and their own but now seemed equally eager to believe that the damage wouldn’t be permanent. So far, it was impossible to say for certain. Even with the files from the facility they knew only some of what Charles had endured, the shocks his system had been put through; he had slept the entire drive back to Westchester and had only been awake for a few short minutes altogether since the rescue. To Hank’s poorly-concealed displeasure, Erik was, part by accident and part by his own design, the person who had spent the most time with Charles and the only one to really have spoken to him. Now he was the only one to have seen—and suffered—his telepathy in action as well. And, thinking back on those last few minutes of his conversation with Charles, Erik wasn’t sure he agreed with Raven at all.

“He didn’t mean to,” he said, pushing through the pain because this mattered. 

“Didn’t mean to what?”

“Use his powers. Lash out at me. Last thing I remember…he was so scared.”

“Of you?” Raven’s voice was suddenly ice. “Erik, what did you _do_?”

“Of himself,” Erik said. He didn’t even bother to protest his own innocence; couldn’t, in good conscience. He’d only meant to help, but good intentions meant nothing when he’d pressured Charles into using his powers as surely as if he’d threatened him. And he’d touched Charles without warning, both physically and telepathically, knowing _exactly_ what that meant to someone who had been so completely robbed of control over their own body. Sick with self-loathing, he continued, “He thought he was dreaming, that he was still back there—I thought that he could check my mind, confirm through someone else’s senses if he couldn’t believe his own. I told him that using my powers helped me remember who I was, when I got out of prison.”

“Oh, my God,” Raven said disbelievingly. “That’s such a bad idea that it borders on suicidal. And you really think the two of you went through the same thing?”

It was difficult to summon anger when his entire body felt heavy enough to sink through the mattress, but Erik at least managed to snarl from his prone position. “We were both captured for being mutants, robbed of our freedom and our powers by cowardly humans who didn’t understand that cutting off a mutation is like losing a sense, it’s torture—”

“Okay, okay,” Raven interrupted, pressing down on his chest firmly enough to make him aware that his breathing had quickened with anxiety. “But listen, you can’t think like that, or this will happen again and this telepathic hangover you’ve got will feel like a pleasant dream in comparison. You couldn’t access your powers for years, and I can’t imagine how painful that was. But he couldn’t get away from his, and he could only use them exactly the way they wanted him to. He was a weapon, aimed at targets that he could _feel_. And the only alternative was to focus on people who felt dead. No minds at all.”

For a moment the nausea was back. Erik had never considered how the helmet felt to Charles, had imagined it simply as what it was: an impenetrable metal wall between them. For someone who loved metal, the image was reassuring; from the other side…

“The helmets?” he managed.

“He told me when I dropped by about a month ago,” Raven said almost apologetically. “Said talking to you was like talking to a statue with your face. Sometimes he couldn’t even understand what you were saying.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Would it have made a difference if you had?” Raven asked, and thankfully moved on before Erik could even think about the answer. “You know, the one thing he always feared more than anything when we were kids was losing control. Every time he said I couldn’t drink, or I had to wear that stupid blond disguise out in public, or he wouldn’t argue with me until we got inside because he was worried my powers might slip…I don’t think it was about me at all.”

“So he was always afraid of his power,” Erik said. He hoped it sounded as contemptuous as usual, with no hint of the recently-developed anxiety that Charles might have been right that churned alongside the nausea in his still-unsteady stomach. “Why are you telling me this? Not that I mind the walk down memory lane, but you’re rarely so sentimental.”

“The point is, using his powers might not be as _comforting_ for Charles as it was for you. Not if they’ve been used against his will, as part of his torture. Not if they’ve made his worst fear come true. And I’m telling you this because I am trying my hardest to stack the deck in your favor here so you don’t make a mistake this boneheaded again the second I’m gone.”

Erik had the uncomfortable feeling that he’d been two steps behind this entire conversation, and rather than admit it was now three he exerted a monumental effort and some unattractive grimacing to prop himself up against the headboard, a vantage point from which he could glare more effectively. If his eyes were narrowed primarily as an attempt to stop Raven’s face from spinning like a pinwheel, she didn’t have to know that. 

Unfortunately, she seemed more irritated than intimidated by his reaction. 

“You’re the genius who went on national television and called for mutants everywhere to take up arms or step into the light or whatever florid metaphor popped into your head at the time. You disappeared right after so you may have missed the memo, but they _did_ , and they didn’t stop when Charles went missing.” Raven sighed, deflated a little. The new Brotherhood existed in Erik’s mind as an abstract entity, but for the first time he realized that they had names to her, faces, their own traumas to escape. “I’ve been gone for three weeks and…something’s come up. I have to go back.”

He hadn’t thought it was possible to feel more unsteady, but Erik abruptly realized that the thought of doing this, staying in the mansion, without Raven wasn’t one he’d even considered, or liked now that he was forced to. For all his bluster in the motel room that first morning that he didn’t need friends, that the fewer people he had to deal with the better, that he couldn’t trust anyone—Raven was and always had been an exception. The only one who broke more of his rules than her was her brother.

“I should go with you,” he heard himself say, distantly.

Clearly that wasn’t the reaction she’d been expecting. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I’ll go with you,” Erik repeated, wondering when his mouth had gone so dry. “It’s past time I returned to the Brotherhood. I’ve been—remiss in my duties.”

Nothing about the past few days had made it any easier to see Raven look at him like she saw a person and not a figurehead, but this time he felt too sick to lash out in return. Instead he tried to imagine becoming Magneto again, what it would mean to put on that armor—the helmet, the cape, the cold demeanor and unforgiving rhetoric. To value his powers and his strength and that nebulous idea of _a people_ over any one life, even his own. To be part of an army again, even if he did stand at its head, all living either on the run or on top of one another in a crowded base carved out of a mountain or underground, skittering around each other like ants. People looking to him for answers, voices shouting over each other in meetings, arguments about strategy, brushing shoulders with strangers in the hall who would later brag that they’d touched the great Magneto. He was so lost in the thought of it that he didn’t notice that his body and all the metal in the room were trembling at the same frequency until Raven put a hand on his leg, making him realize that he had pulled his knees up to his chest like a child.

“You don’t want that,” she said.

“It’s never mattered what I want,” Erik said. It wasn’t bitterness; just a fact. “Nor you. That’s not how this works.”

“What makes you think you’re ready now, when you weren’t three days ago?” Raven said, switching tacks.

Erik scoffed, more at his own stupidity than the question itself. “I have to be. This mission has proved that. They kidnapped their greatest ally in broad daylight and tortured him for weeks with no hesitation—with nerve like that, there’s nothing they won’t do. Nothing they aren’t doing at this very moment. Any doubts I had after Washington as to the continued importance of our cause are gone. We saved the human race once ten years ago and I saw what happened. I don’t know why I thought it would be different the second time.”

He was almost talking to himself by the end, trailing off vaguely and wondering how the hell some lukewarm editorials had convinced him that the fight for mutant rights had been won and the danger was over. He’d wanted it to be true so badly, that was the trouble. Wanting something didn’t make it so, a lesson he’d taught himself before he was ten and every year of his life since and yet all it took to make him forget it, apparently, was Charles Xavier reappearing with that same tired refrain about acceptance and cooperation, still burdened with a fatal misapprehension that Erik was a better man than he actually was. And once again, Charles was the one who had paid for Erik’s mistakes. Raven had held him in check so far; he just had to hope she could keep doing it when they went back to the Brotherhood.

After a moment of that same penetrating stare, Raven nodded. “That’s better. Faster progress than I thought, too. Answer’s still no, though.”

Erik grit his teeth, torn between fury at her presumption, his usual determination to throw the entirety of his mind and soul into a decision once he made it, and a quiet, unhappy hum of denial in the back of his mind at the thought of leaving the mansion. “Mystique—”

“Think about it, Erik! You really want to leave Charles and Hank here alone when we still don’t have the faintest idea how much of Charles is still Charles?”

Erik tried to sound coolly dismissive and not as howlingly possessive as his instinctive _Of course not_ would have implied. “Hank will take care of him.” 

“And how’d it go the last time we made that assumption?” Before the sudden tension in Erik’s body could manifest in violence—they’d endured their own guilt separately throughout the years, only talking about it once or twice in short, clipped conversations after too much whiskey, and both knew how quickly it could escalate—Raven backed down, taking refuge in strategy. “We need Charles on our side this time, Erik. We can’t win this war without him. At best it’ll be a stalemate, at worst it’ll be Logan’s future all over again. So make sure he’s sane, and then make sure Hank isn’t filling his head with all kinds of bullshit about forgiveness and innocent bystanders and mutant-human cooperation, okay?”

Perhaps it was just the telepathic hangover, but those were hard lines to read between. Slowly Erik asked, “You want me to brainwash him?” 

“I want you to look out for him better than he would look out for himself,” Raven said, with gentleness all the more devastating for being so abrupt. “Which is all you’ve ever tried to do.”

There was no response to that that didn’t involve a high likelihood of Erik embarrassing himself by breaking down in one way or another, so he cleared his throat and changed the subject. “He won’t be happy that you’ve left and I’ve stayed. Neither of them will.”

“They will not. Which is why I’m saying goodbye to you and not to them.”

She smiled at him, conspiratorial and cheerful, and it was almost enough to make Erik smile back despite the lingering nausea. “You really are abandoning me, then.”

“Oh, stop whining. You’re a grown man, you can handle two nerds.”

Sometimes it was so easy to forget that those two nerds were a scientific prodigy with super strength and the most powerful telepath known to man, who both also happened to be terrifyingly intelligent and pioneers in a subset of genetics that science hadn’t even recognized yet. Especially here, in this room, with his old clothes hanging in the closet, it was natural to flash back to the days when he and Mystique could make fun of Hank’s glasses and Charles’s sweater vests. But then Erik remembered Hank’s expression as he carried Charles out of the burning facility, the way Charles had leaned into his touch like an abused animal desperate for the slightest bit of affection before the inevitable kick came, and laughter seemed obscene after all.

Raven seemed to follow the same line of thought; she sobered quickly, and stood up. “Take care of them, Erik.”

“You too, Mystique.”

She left silently. Erik meant to get up too, brush his teeth and hair, possibly even shower for the first time in days, and then track Hank down for what would in all likelihood be a truly uncomfortable conversation, but he fell asleep before his head stopped spinning.


	10. Charles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hurt comfort hurt comfort comfort comfort hurt ?????

When Erik told him Raven had left, that she was very sorry and she loved him and she would be back soon, Charles inhaled and exhaled a long, deep breath and stared at the ceiling while his eyes grew shiny. Then the first tear spilled over and all at once his face crumpled like tissue paper. He cried like he hadn’t cried in years, like he would never stop. There was something both beautiful and repulsive about him, Leander drowning in his own tears, and Erik watched him slack-jawed and helpless for a moment before reaching out. Charles turned on his side and wrapped his whole upper body around their joined hands and Erik stroked the clearly-defined joints in his spine and his tangled hair and his cheek blotched and wet and slippery. He might have been whispering stupid platitudes again, but if he was Charles didn’t hear them.

His baby sister had left him again and it felt like the end of the world.

“You remember her,” Erik whispered, daring to sound surprised.

“How could I forget my sister,” Charles spat back, sniffling and miserable. 

Erik tensed, bracing himself against some kind of onslaught, and Charles was so taken aback by the stubborn, sad resignation in his expression that he hiccupped. His memory was a hoard of slightly-mismatched puzzle pieces and it took a long moment to sift through them and contextualize Erik’s reaction. There was a kaleidoscope of Ravens in his mind—the Raven blue and tiny and half-starved in his kitchen, the Raven blonde and smiling in their Oxford flat, the Raven Erik called Mystique, stern and strong as she navigated the blood and bodies and rubble of his prison. There was a contrast between Raven and Mystique. Not that one was a shadow of the other, exactly, but Mystique felt _brighter_ , somehow. More fully present. More distant, too—still with that underlying emotional resonance of _my little sister, so beautiful, so special_ , but tinged with melancholy. Mystique was a beloved stranger.

Erik was responsible for that distance, and he was waiting for Charles to remember that he hated him for it. 

“You only did for her what I did for you,” Charles said. “I can’t blame you for her choices unless I blame myself for yours.”

He wasn’t entirely sure what he meant, but he knew soul-deep that he felt responsible in a way that defied words and logic—for what Erik did and for who he was, some odd transmutation of protectiveness and possessiveness. All Erik’s burdens, all the blood on his hands, were Charles’s too because at some point he had fundamentally changed Erik, as Erik had him. That was a certainty, but all the rest was confusion and contradictions. Raven in his head was kaleidoscopic; Erik was the reflection in a fun-house mirror, both larger and smaller than life, distorted, exaggerated, monstrous in a way that could only be personal bias, not fact. No living, breathing human existed that matched the Erik in Charles’s head—certainly not the one sitting next to him, patiently waiting to be hated again. 

“You do blame me for her choices. You blame me for everyone’s choices,” Erik said, not unkindly. 

Charles managed a twisted smile and wet laugh, calmed to the point of silent tears instead of racking sobs. “Well, you must admit it simplifies things tremendously. A monolithic enemy.”

“A monolith, really? I had no idea you thought so highly of me, Charles.”

“I’ve always thought highly of you,” Charles said honestly, doing Erik the favor of looking away as he spoke. He wiped his eyes on the silk sleeve of his pajamas instead, took a few deep breaths, felt the hysteria drain out of his body like poison lanced from a wound. 

“I’ll miss her,” he said.

Yet he didn’t, really, in the days that followed. Her absence left no discernable gaps in the life of the house; she slipped away like she’d never existed and nothing changed. Erik and Hank missed her passively, with no sense of urgency, which reinforced Charles’s instinctive understanding—most of his understanding seemed to be instinctive—that Raven never stayed, or stayed away, very long. As for him…well, it was difficult enough to grasp simple things, much less complicated emotions like loss and entangled memories like the ones of his sister. 

And there was already so much to take in.

He spent most of the first few days asleep. He was too tired and easily overwhelmed to leave the room, though Erik brought him out onto the balcony. Neither of them slept well, or at normal times, so they watched sunrises and sunsets, drank cups of perfectly-made tea, took turns reading Victorian poetry to each other out loud. Charles liked Hopkins, Erik preferred Arnold. There was a record player on the desk one morning when Charles woke up and after that there was music in the air nearly all the time, everything from opera and symphonies to the Beatles and Stones. Erik didn’t like silence.

Hank came in often, not the skinny pale driver from his rescue but large, blue and furry, which Charles liked better. It felt more honest, and also less reminiscent of other doctors, the clay ones in white coats whose faces flashed before him at odd moments, making him flinch away from nothing. Hank always noticed and never said anything about it. He had learned quickly to be circumspect around Charles. At first he’d made an effort to carefully explain everything he was going to do—change bandages, draw blood, remove stiches—but that made Charles hyperventilate and press his hands over his ears.

“Just do it,” he’d gasped, because there was a voice in his head saying _This may hurt, Dr. Xavier_ , listing every awful symptom he was about to experience, and it made him want to crawl out of his skin. “Please, I don’t care if it hurts, just get it over with!”

Hank stuck to pleasantries after that, though he was always friendly and smiling, chatting about safe things like the weather and what they would have for lunch. He managed to make the reason for each visit seem like an afterthought, an “Oh, can I get one more sample from you?” tossed out nonchalantly on his way out the door. 

Even slow on the uptake as he was, it didn’t take Charles long to notice that Erik conveniently found reasons to leave the room every time Hank arrived, or that Hank frequently timed his visits to coincide with Erik being in the shower, kitchen, or on a run around the grounds. When they couldn’t avoid each other the atmosphere was a tense miasma of thinly-veiled hostility and awkwardness. Erik made snide comments; Hank pretended he wasn’t there. At least there didn’t seem to be any danger of violence erupting between them—they just didn’t like each other. The only thing they had in common was Charles, which was odd because he was fairly certain that he was the cause of their resentment and disdain for each other in the first place.

“Honestly, what did he ever do to you? He’s a perfectly nice fellow,” Charles said reproachfully one day after Erik had been especially scathing.

“Nothing at all, to me.” Erik didn’t even bother looking over, face placid and eyes hidden behind sunglasses as the day inched from afternoon into dusk. They were sitting on the balcony again, Charles in a wingchair Erik must have scavenged from another bedroom, Sinatra drifting out from the record player. When he wasn’t being an asshole to Hank, Erik existed mostly in a state of serenity so pronounced it was almost aggressive. A full five minutes passed before he finished the thought. “We have a difference of opinion on how he treated you.”

“While you were gone.” They had euphemisms for the large gaps in Charles’s memory, for certain things Erik didn’t want to talk about, for mutual conversational pitfalls and potential triggers. The year after Cuba and his decade in prison were all referred to as one stretch of time.

“Yes.”

“How would you have treated me, then?”

“I try not to think like that, Charles,” Erik said after another long stretch of silence. “There’s nothing but pain to be gained from dwelling on the past, what if, what could have been…none of it changes what was.”

“Oh, come now. It’s human nature to think of the roads not taken, isn’t it?”

Erik’s lips twisted mirthlessly. “Fortunately for us, we’re not human.”

As if to prove his point, the sky splashed with the pink and gold of a setting sun suddenly darkened, covered by clouds that came from nowhere. There was an ominous roll of thunder in the air, a metallic scent on the wind that whipped their hair into their eyes. Right before the rain began to fall in sheets, Erik pulled the metal from the sheeting on the roof down into a makeshift awning over their heads. He tucked his now-unnecessary sunglasses on the table next to their empty mugs and held his hand outside the safety of their metal canopy, watching raptly as the rain filled his palm immediately, then spilled over to pool on the balcony flagstones. Below them the grounds were drenched already.

Erik tipped another palmful of rainwater to the ground, rotating his hand to watch the drops run off his skin like he’d never seen anything more fascinating. He was a man of intense, unrelenting focus, which Charles found intimidating when turned on himself and oddly charming when directed at the most mundane things. Rain, a unique flavor of tea, a new book or record—he’d heard Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” for the first time a few days ago and made Charles listen to it at least twenty times since—they enthralled him, and Erik enthralled enthralled Charles in turn. 

“I wonder what Ororo’s upset about now,” Erik shouted over the downpour.

“A storm this bad is a temper tantrum. It won’t last long,” Charles shouted back. 

He was learning not to censor himself when he knew something intuitively. At first he’d said barely anything at all, practically mute with fear and some kind of conditioning he couldn’t really remember. Even when he had tentatively accepted that this wasn’t a dream, that they had come for him and he was safe now, again, it was difficult to articulate the half-formed fragments of memory that came back to him, sometimes in flashes, sometimes drifting up peacefully from his subconscious. Hank said it would get better as his body healed and he shouldn’t worry about remembering everything all at once. An incomplete memory was still progress. And though it was so tempting to hoard his memories, pore over them for details and savor the sense of self that was slowly being rebuilt from the rubble of his mind, Erik and Hank looked at him with such relief and gratitude any time he shared them that he was slowly becoming more verbal.

So they knew that he knew that this was his home, that a handful of children lived here, and one of them had only arrived a few weeks ago and was having trouble settling in. Charles had a few scattered memories of her face—a rare smile, a shock of white hair, her nose crinkled dubiously at Raven’s old clothes scavenged from the attic—but Hank had had to remind him that her name was Ororo and she had come from Egypt. 

She also had about as much control over her powers as she did over her temper.

“She misses you,” Hank had admitted after a similar rainstorm a few days ago. “The kids knew you were gone and in trouble. They got pretty hysterical. We told them you’re safe and fine but you’re very tired. I don’t think they understand why they can’t see you.”

“Because he’s very tired,” Erik had snapped, whose bouts of overprotectiveness included children, apparently. “What’s not to understand?”

“Yes, thank you, Erik, that’s very helpful,” Charles had said in a tone that indicated the opposite was true. For some reason that made Erik smile, which Charles only found more annoying. To Hank, much more sincerely, he’d added, “And thank you, Hank, for handling everything. I do appreciate the…breathing space, for now. I’ll tell Alex the same.”

Alex he had only seen a handful of times. He had stuck his head in the door on the day Charles arrived and once or twice since, called him professor, told him to relax and heal up because everything was running fine, no need to push himself. Then he’d glared at Erik—and there did seem to be a danger of violence erupting between them—and disappeared again into the depths of a house Charles only remembered in pieces.

“I should help her,” he said now, looking up at the black clouds. “She’s a child and she’s scared and it would be so easy to help her. So why can’t I do it?”

“For the same reason that I spent two months in a Florida motel watching Saturday morning cartoons,” Erik said. “You’re hiding. How?”

“I’m sorry?”

“How could you help her?”

“What kind of a question is that? I could open the damn door, I could leave this room and they would _know_ that I’m just fine and they don’t have to be afraid anymore. I could comfort them the way a teacher or a guardian or…whatever I am, should!”

“Ah,” Erik said neutrally. 

Charles gritted his teeth, barely held back a heavy sigh. Erik did that a lot—asking questions and then reacting like Charles had failed some kind of test. He was fairly certain it had something to do with what had happened between them on the first day when Erik had tried to force whatever lay dormant in Charles’s mind back to life, nearly killing them both. He’d done quite a lot of yelling the next time he saw Erik after that, who had been pale and repentant and hadn’t attempted anything similar since. But he hadn’t forgotten, and these annoyingly vague questions were only slightly subtler attempts to make Charles acknowledge that he had options for communication not available to everyone. 

“Until I have better control, I’m not going near anyone’s head, much less a child’s,” he said. “I did enough damage to you.”

“That was my fault, I’ve told you,” Erik said. “And I do wonder how you expect to develop better control if you won’t use your powers at all.”

He kept his voice light, almost teasing, though Charles knew that he was deadly serious. Erik used his powers like every metal object in the world was an extension of his body, fiercely and joyfully. There was no way for Charles to explain that his own mutation felt separate from himself, alien, a time bomb shoved inside his skull. Telepathy, he thought deliberately. It was called telepathy and he was a telepath and saying the word wouldn’t hurt anyone. Using it would, but he had no intention of that, wasn’t even sure he could have if he’d wanted to. The only way to control it was to keep it locked away, but if it kept Erik from lecturing him again Charles wasn’t above implying that he would “improve” eventually. It was only a harmless white lie.

“The point is, I’m supposed to be the headmaster of this school and it’s about time I started acting like it,” he said.

Erik looked alarmed. “That’s insane, Charles. After what was done to you? You can’t—”

He was interrupted by a flash of lightning that arced between the dark clouds and then down, jagged and bright enough to burn behind closed eyes, bisecting a tree only a few hundred feet away. The clap of thunder that followed a heartbeat later was so deafening that Charles jumped and then the echoing boom was his own skull bouncing off the floor of a shower stall and the raindrops falling on the flagstones were falling on white tiles, warm on his naked body. He was disoriented, bleeding, and the water swirling down the drain was pink. _Phencyclidine_ echoed in his mind in a strange-yet-familiar voice, distorted, skipping like a damaged record. _Phencyclidine phencyclidine phencyclidine and I am so proud of you my dear doctor my creation_. There were dry lips on his forehead like a blasphemous benediction and a body lying next to him bent at impossible angles.

“Charles, it’s not real, _it’s not real_ ,” a voice cut across the corrupted memory, not frantic but very firm, and Charles opened his eyes, gasping. Erik hadn’t moved from his chair or touched him but looked like it was taking every ounce of restraint not to reach out.

“There you are,” he said. “Back with me? What was it?”

“The thunder,” Charles managed, already bracing himself for the next burst of it, but then he blinked, came fully back to himself, realized—Erik’s hair was glinting ginger again, lingering rays of sun shining down from a cloudless sky, and the only evidence the storm had ever happened was quickly-drying puddles on the balcony around them. 

Erik reached over and squeezed his hand, apparently having decided that Charles was coherent enough not to judge him a threat and lash out again. “It’s over, just like you said. Ororo’s calmed down, we’re all fine.”

“How long was I out?” Charles said, bewildered. Ororo’s tantrums never stopped as suddenly as they began—her storms faded from torrential rains to a light drizzle, or hurricane-force winds to a healthy breeze, as real tears faded from choking sobs to the occasional teardrop to nothing. He looked around, stunned, but the air was still and quiet, without even the humidity to be expected after a summer storm. 

“Five seconds, if that. Someone must have given her ice cream.”

“Yeah, of course,” Charles agreed mindlessly, rubbing his forehead to ease away the peculiar tightness there, an ineffable sense that he had escaped his body and then snapped back into it too quickly. Surely it had been more than five seconds. This was hardly his first flashback, though usually he emerged from them feeling like time had been compressed, not stretched. Yet he felt unaccountably shaken, this time.

Erik squeezed his hand again, his measured calm fraying under an increasing amount of concern.

“Can we go inside? I’m tired.” Charles managed a weak smile and then, knowing how ridiculous it sounded: “And then could you check on Ororo, please?”

Erik blinked, surprised. “Of course, but…why?”

“Hank gives her too much dessert,” Charles said, an answer that had the benefit of being true even if it had nothing to do with the real reason. The real reason was intuition; a kind of near-memory he would normally have forced himself to share. But this time, uneasy in a way he didn’t understand, he let Erik carry him inside and then leave, and didn’t say another word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have the last couple chapters been hella boring? I feel like they have. I figured I owed you guys some comfort but the hurt is just so much more fun to write :)
> 
> Also all you guys who comment, kudos, bookmark are making this a fuckin incredible experience and i want to give all of you awkwardly long hugs


	11. Erik

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shaving time does not go super great.

“This isn’t my room,” Charles declared one morning, glaring at the painting on the opposite wall that was probably called _Fox-hunt on Lord Edmund Bickford-Cavendish’s Estate, 1750_ , or something equally British. “I want to be in my own room.”

“Your room is on the first floor. Much nearer the common areas, the children’s rooms.” 

Erik hated that he only knew this because Hank had told him. That resentment helped him to maintain a stern expression despite the powerful pout that Charles turned his way, though he still only succeeded because there were still bags under Charles’s eyes, weight he wasn’t gaining back, a tremor in his hands that came and went—Hank suspected nerve damage from one of the drugs. The only thing that would stop Erik from giving Charles whatever he wanted was when the withholding was for Charles’s own good.

When pouting didn’t work, Charles scowled instead. “I’m not a child, Erik. You can’t keep me confined to my room, especially when _it isn’t even my room_.”

“I’m not trying to,” Erik said patiently. Dealing with Charles was an exercise in patience—always, but especially these days. “I’m asking if you feel ready to be bothered by people wanting things from you from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed. Considering you nearly jumped out of your skin this morning when a door slammed downstairs, it seems a fair question.”

“I’ll be fine,” Charles insisted, though he sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as Erik. “Besides, I won’t be alone, will I?”

Erik scoffed and didn’t bother to hide it when he rolled his eyes. That was a low blow and they both knew it, but Charles was also right and they both knew that too. Technically they hadn’t been sharing a room; Erik kept his clothes in a room down the hall, went there when Hank made his visits, showered there, sometimes retreated there when he became overwhelmed, as he still often did. But more nights than not he carried Charles in from the balcony sometime long after midnight and crawled under the ridiculously plush duvet with him for a few hours before one of their nightmares woke them both. 

It hadn’t worked, at first. Sleeping next to Raven had been strange enough; he wasn’t used to another body in his space, and even with both of them on opposite sides of the motel bed Erik had been more than half-tempted to sleep on the floor. Only the scratchy, dubiously-hygienic carpet and the thought of Raven looking at him with pity the next morning kept him glued to his side of the mattress, sheets locked between clenched fingers, staring at the wall until, exhausted and overwhelmed, he blinked and somehow it was morning. 

Sleeping with Charles, in the mansion, had been outright unthinkable for the first few nights. Erik had dozed uncomfortably in chairs, read until dawn, sat with his back ramrod straight against the headboard and watched for hours as Charles slept, his forehead pressed into Erik’s leg, his unconscious frown hidden under his tangled hair. Part of it was paranoia, a kneejerk distrust of anyone within arm’s reach—it had been so long since anyone had come that close without intending to hurt him—and a refusal to let his guard down around anyone who could be dangerous (and Charles was the most dangerous man he had ever met). 

But the rest of Erik’s insomnia was voluntary: he hadn’t believed he would ever have this again, and he’d be damned if he missed a minute of it. The sensory input felt new only because it was so old—sheets warm from Charles’s body heat, the same thick, silky strands of hair between his fingers, the way Charles reached for him in his sleep like he could still be trusted. Erik savored the closeness at least as much as it unsettled him, especially since each night he fell asleep convinced that Charles would be gone in the morning—a hallucination vanishing into nothing, kidnapped again, or, as seemed most likely, so full of renewed hatred for Erik and his methods that he wanted nothing to do with either of them. 

It hadn’t happened yet, but Erik couldn’t shake the conviction that it was only a matter of time. 

The fantasies that had occupied him for ten years hadn’t happened yet either. Not when waking up with Charles’s arm thrown across his chest was still enough to startle him and he had to remind Charles of basic facts about his own life every day.

“Raven’s only been gone a week, Charles. She’ll be back as soon as she can.” Said calmly after Charles asked plaintively where his sister was, if she was still mad at him.

“No, Sean’s not here. He went to Vietnam.” Guiltily grateful that Charles simply nodded and changed the subject, never asking when he would be back.

“They’re _yours_ , Charles,” when Charles asked why he could hear children downstairs. “They’re all under the age of twelve and they can’t wait for you to teach them about genetics.”

Erik thought he could be forgiven occasional sarcasm, given the circumstances. 

“Fine. I’ll help you move your things. Tonight, after the children are asleep so they don’t make a fuss,” he said. 

He was tempted to add something irritable, like _but don’t expect me to carry you everywhere when we’re downstairs too_ , but bit down on it before it could escape. He and Charles had never needed weapons or powers to hurt each other—they’d always managed just fine with words. Even his ten years of solitude and meditation hadn’t kept him from falling into old, antagonistic patterns the moment they were in proximity to each other for more than five minutes. As these past days at the mansion had proved, he and Charles got along best when they didn’t speak at all, when they existed in an unsustainable idyllic world where they defined normality. It was the world Erik would fight for and give to Charles one day, but it was proving difficult to remember that this short glimpse wasn’t the real thing.

Perhaps moving downstairs was for the best. He would have to find Charles’s wheelchair—by himself, because he doubted Charles would remember and it was unbearable to think of asking Hank—and watch as atrophied muscles and shaking hands and damnable pride all made basic mobility even more exhausting and painful than it usually was, and know that it was his fault. That chair was an unforgettable reminder that Erik had done more permanent damage to Charles than those sadistic humans and that he hadn’t come anywhere close to redeeming himself yet. Until he could bring Charles into a world that recognized how powerful he was, how perfect, and gave all mutants the respect and safety they deserved, he would be seeking atonement the same way he had sought revenge.

Erik could be patient, in the service of the right cause. 

“I’ll go—” _find your wheelchair_ “—make sure the room’s inhabitable,” he said. Then, with a vague gesture at Charles’s face, “You might want to do something about—all that.”

Charles looked confused. “About what?”

“When was the last time you looked in a mirror?”

He meant it teasingly but Charles tilted his head, obviously thinking hard. “I don’t know. I don’t have much need, do I?”

It took a moment for Erik to process that Charles wasn’t kidding. Regaining a sense of himself physically been so crucial to his recovery in the days since his own escape that it seemed impossible that the same wouldn’t be true for Charles. It hadn’t occurred to him that, aside from when he was on the serum, Charles hadn’t felt in control of his body for longer than Erik had been imprisoned—and nothing in the past week, including his rescue, would have changed that. 

Not that Charles had been neglecting himself, precisely. He had showered regularly, washed his hair, brushed his teeth with the devotion of someone who had been denied the opportunity for weeks, but he’d made no effort to shave, dress in anything but clean pajamas…or look in a mirror, since there were none in the bedroom or bathroom within his reach. Erik blinked stupidly, wondering how he had missed this. Quickly he lifted the standalone mirror atop the dresser by its metal frame, floated it across the room, and affixed it to the wall, in Charles’s line of sight. 

“You’re going to scare the children,” he said, watching Charles narrow his eyes at his own reflection. “You look like you’ve been wandering in the woods for months. Small animals could be living in your hair.”

Charles flashed him something between a grin and a glare, then ran his fingers through his hair and what was turning into quite an impressive beard. While he stared at himself contemplatively, almost like he was assessing a stranger, Erik noticed that his hands were shaking again.

“Come on then,” he sighed. “If you’re determined to do this we’ll do it right.”

“What—” Charles began, but Erik was already in the bathroom, opening and slamming cabinet doors until he had a straight razor, shaving cream, shampoo, comb, scissors, and several towels laid out in a neat line beside the sink. 

“I won’t have you accidentally slitting your throat doing something I could do in my sleep,” he said when he came back into the bedroom to find Charles still looking doubtful.

“Is that supposed to be reassuring?” Charles asked.

Erik nearly smiled. “If you’re expecting reassurance from me you really do have a lot still to remember.”

“I remember you think you’re hilarious,” Charles shot back, for a moment so fully his old self that Erik had to remind himself that this had happened before. There would be snippets of conversation, seconds, sometimes even minutes when Charles seemed completely recovered—confident, charming, innocently arrogant, half an instant away from telepathically whispering a joke or snarky observation. Erik would watch him with a hunger he knew Charles _must_ be able to sense, half-anticipating and half-dreading that knowing look Charles always gave him when he caught Erik’s more predatory thoughts—but it never came, and something behind Charles’s eyes would falter instead, and he would sink into himself, become physically smaller somehow, and Erik would remember that this ordeal was nowhere near over. Sometimes he worried that it might never be.

“Come on,” he said again, instead of responding to the challenging glint in Charles’s eyes. “That beard is going first.”

Somehow, with far more cajoling than he’d thought himself capable of without resorting to threats of violence, Erik got Charles into the bathroom and perched on the other side of the sink with a towel draped around his neck and shoulders.

“Are you all right?” he said. Charles’s fingers were wrapped tightly around the edge of the marble countertop, white at the knuckles, nerves or the physical strain of relying so heavily on muscles in his upper body that were still regaining their strength, Erik couldn’t tell which. “You could sit in the bathtub—”

“Just get on with it, Erik,” Charles said.

It took about forty-five seconds for Erik to realize that he might not have thought this situation through entirely. Between the two victories that were Charles not digging his heels in like the stubborn bastard he was and Charles looking like himself again was a period of silent, searing closeness. Erik had no choice but to stand between Charles’s legs, keep his eyes trained entirely on Charles’s face and his focus sunk into metal that was in constant contact with his skin. He kept his own hands at his sides—his fine control was better when he could feel his powers in the metal with as little interference as possible, including his own skin—until Charles tilted sideways a little and grabbed Erik’s arms to catch himself, and then he kept them at Charles’s elbows to steady them both.

The only time he touched Charles’s face was to apply the shaving cream to his just-trimmed beard, but that was almost easier. Fingertips were practically nothing compared to the heightened sensitivity he felt when his perception was channeled through metal. Now his powers were so deeply immersed in the sharp steel that he could feel the heat of Charles’s skin through it, the blood pulsing just one slip-up away from its surface, his elevated heartbeat, the sharper jawline from too much weight lost too fast, the slightest difference in texture between now-smooth skin and not. Erik concentrated on keeping his breathing even and matched to the razor’s slow, steady swipes, tried not to think about how long it had been since he’d touched _anyone_ this intimately, and how much longer before that had been the last time it had been Charles—that would have been before Cuba, the night before when they’d fucked in the study like the world was about to end, and he needed to _not_ think of that right now.

Once or twice Charles tried to break the awkward silence. Each time Erik snapped, “Be quiet and let me focus,” even though there was nothing he wanted more than a distraction from what was quickly becoming too much sensory input. Lust was one thing and anxiety another, but together they were a new kind of overwhelming, one he had long since forgotten how to handle in a way that didn’t involve broken bathroom fixtures.

He was so focused on maintaining control over himself and the razor that he didn’t notice Charles’s tremors until they had spread from his hands to his whole upper body. 

“What—?”

At the same time Charles said shakily, “Step back, Erik. Now. Step back now.”

He did, all the way to the bathroom wall, watching warily as Charles rubbed his forehead. “What’s wrong?”

“My head feels strange. My mind is…vibrating.”

“Your telepathy.” 

“I don’t know,” Charles said in a tone of voice that meant yes. 

Remembering the last time this had happened, Erik made his thoughts small, built mental metal walls up high around them to prevent himself from reaching out to Charles on purpose or by instinct. The result would be the same, if Charles’s telepathy perceived him as a threat.

“I hate this,” Charles muttered, shaking his head like he was shaking off a punch. “I hate this, I hate it, it’s not mine anymore, whatever they did—” Suddenly he looked up, eyes wide with new knowledge. “I’m dangerous.”

Old knowledge, for Erik. Comforting, though clearly Charles thought the opposite. “Of course you are. We all are. But you’re good, too. You always have been.”

“You were good too, once. Now look at us.”

“You told me I still could be, a long time ago.” Erik tried to ignore the stab of hurt at the idea that Charles might have changed his mind. 

“I did, didn’t I,” Charles said, like he had nearly forgotten something Erik had treasured for a decade. It had sustained him more than he liked to admit, that memory of his body humming with power and Charles looking at him with tears in his eyes and a hope and faith in him that Erik didn’t have in himself. Of course he had known even then that he would disappoint Charles—though he’d had no idea how catastrophically—but Charles forgave the way that Erik held grudges, quickly and then forever, and even the painful realization a few years into his imprisonment that Charles wasn’t coming for him hadn’t quite erased the conviction that he was out there, somewhere, believing that there was good in Erik when everyone else had decided he was irredeemable. 

Erik swallowed an angry retort that wasn’t based in anger at all, changed the subject quickly. “How’s your head?”

“A bit porous.” Charles sounded distant, like he had to reach back in time to find the words. “I may lie down when we’re done here, but I do appreciate the help, Erik, truly. You should keep going. I’m fine, there’s nothing wrong.”

Charles’s smile seemed strained, but he was easily tired these days and it would be a big step, moving downstairs—he was probably more nervous about that than he let on. Erik smiled back and looked around, wondering when he had stepped so far away and why. He took advantage of the distance to appraise Charles’s half-shaved face, nodded at the years it took off his appearance even if his eyes still seemed far too old, made a mental note to get him to eat more. He remembered a few of his mother’s old recipes, chicken soup with matzah balls, latkes, the rare pot roast when they could afford it, and he wasn’t above guilting Charles into eating every single one of them. 

The rest of the job passed quickly, in comfortable silence. Charles had his eyes closed, perhaps dozing already, and Erik found himself lulled into something nearly trance-like, nothing in the world more pressing than the razor in his hand, warm from his skin and Charles’s. Finally he wiped away the last of the shaving cream with a warm washcloth and stepped away again, tapping Charles’s shoulder until he opened his eyes.

“What, are you done already?” he said, surprised.

“Told you I was good with a blade, in my sleep or in yours,” Erik said. Then, dryly, “I’m glad you find my company so stimulating.”

The haircut could wait, he decided, until after Charles had rested.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one took so long! It was not cooperating and I still kinda hate it but I really want to move on to more interesting "plot" things so at least now the transitional stuff is done!


	12. Charles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things are _so good_ (dun dun DUN)

The wheelchair took the corner between the main hall and the kitchen too fast and avoided both doorframes by no more than a fraction of an inch. Charles scrambled to slow his speed just enough to regain control but not enough for the sudden stop to send him flying; entered the kitchen with a skidding noise; the left wheel came off the ground entirely for a terrifying moment; and then with a teeth-rattling amount of force crashed back down, all momentum depleted, right in front of a stubbornly stationary Jean Grey. For a few seconds they simply stared at each other, Charles catching his breath and Jean wide-eyed and watchful but quick to return his smile when he finally relaxed, chuckled ruefully.

“Seems I haven’t quite gotten the hang of it yet,” Charles said.

“You didn’t hit anything at all this time,” Jean offered. 

“Still, I had rather hoped that muscle memory would have helped…expedite things, I suppose.” 

Charles was careful to keep his tone light, reveal none of the very real frustration that lay behind his words. Someone, probably Hank, had warned Jean at some point after his rescue about his unstable telepathy, and even though her own powers were poorly-controlled she had been careful not to speak mind to mind or reach out in any way, in case his powers interpreted even the simplest surface touch as a threat. But even without her telepathy she was an astonishingly—almost eerily—perceptive girl, picking up on moods and tonal shifts and hidden meanings like they’d been shouted out loud. She was also as bad at hiding her own feelings as she was good at sensing theirs, and that combined with her chameleon-like tendency to adopt the moods of everyone around her occasionally resulted in several hours spent calming her down because Erik was in a bad mood or Alex was thinking of friends who hadn’t made it out of Vietnam.

“I was just about to make a cup of tea,” Charles said, relieved that Jean hadn’t picked up on his irritation after all. “Would you like one too, Jean?”

“Yes please, professor,” she said. Then hastened to add, “But I don’t want to bother you…”

Someone, and he suspected Erik this time, had clearly lectured the children about not pestering him too much; they were sweet but shy, eager to spend time with him but almost too nervous to ask for it. Charles smiled again, reassuringly. “Nonsense, I’d love your company. If you could pour some milk into that saucer and some sugar in that bowl, that would be most helpful. I believe we have some digestives in the pantry as well.”

Jean sprang into motion, careful to leave him room to maneuver about the kitchen, filling the kettle and assembling tea bags while she piled the rest on a tray. Charles focused on keeping his breathing steady and movements methodical, ignoring the expected but still jarring stab of déjà vu. Even after a week of living downstairs again, there was still something terribly surreal about making a cup of tea in his own kitchen. It felt at once familiar and like his hands belonged to a stranger. More scraps of memory floated to the surface of his mind every day, but so much of it was still opaque, obscured by a mist of conflicting emotions and repressed memories. It was almost easier _not_ to remember, to push through the flashbacks and do exactly what Charles Xavier would do, not be exactly who Charles Xavier was.

“Old routines will help,” Hank had said during one of an endless series of checkups. “Nothing too strenuous. Make your own tea, read your favorite books, _mild_ physical therapy, play chess…would a list help?”

“He doesn’t need a to-do list for every second of the day, Beast,” Erik had snapped from the corner. He had moved downstairs at the same time as Charles, in practice if not in theory, which meant his borderline-disastrous encounters with Alex and Hank now occurred several times a day instead of once every few days. So far none had ended in actual violence, but the amount of snarling that went on was more suited to a kennel for strays than a house containing four grown men.

As he handed Jean two cups of tea to set on the table and then rolled after her, Charles cast about for polite conversation. 

“Professor Summers tells me you’re doing very well in training, you know.”

Jean blushed, looking away so that her pleased smile was obscured by her long red hair. Even though she had been at the barely-reopened Xavier’s Institute the longest, she still responded to praise for her powers like a flower turning to the sun. “He’s really nice to me, even though my mutation isn’t like Scott and Ororo’s. We play a game with clay pigeons where he tries to hit them so they explode with his powers and I try to move them around so he can’t.”

Charles tried to disguise his laughter by slurping his tea loudly; if anyone could make blowing things up educational, of course it was Alex. “That certainly sounds like Professor Summers. And also quite a lot of fun. Perhaps I could come observe your lessons sometime?”

“Oh, yes please. And maybe you can help me—”

Jean broke off suddenly, horrified, her hands twitching like she wanted to clap them over her mouth. Charles tried not to wince; he didn’t have to read her mind to know what she’d been about to say, or how close she was now to bursting into tears at her mistake. And how could he blame her, when he would have given anything at her age to have another telepath to help him ease into his powers? Perhaps he wouldn’t have thought he was insane, then; perhaps Raven wouldn’t have forbidden from going into her mind, if his shields had been better or his projections less intrusive. 

“Dr. McCoy would have my head at the moment, I’m afraid,” he said gently, trying to soften the refusal. “He’s very adamant that I do absolutely nothing useful, at least a little while longer. If you have any questions I’d be more than happy to answer them, but for now it might be best you focus on your telekinesis.”

“Of course, professor, I’m really sorry—”

“Nonsense, Jean, I know you meant well. And I very much look forward to working with you, as soon as Dr. McCoy gives me the all-clear.”

Fortunately, Jean was still too embarrassed to notice how blatantly he was lying. Charles knew he should feel guilty about pushing all the blame for his reluctance onto Hank but he didn’t, really; there was a new streak of fierce self-preservation underlying his behavior these days, with a potential for cruelty he didn’t like to dwell on. White lies and harmless scapegoating were the least of it. He was convinced that using his telepathy would be catastrophic the way he was convinced that Erik’s mutant-supremacy agenda was wrong and Raven’s true nature was good—utterly and unshakably, and woe betide anyone who tried to persuade him differently.

No one had, as yet. For all his constant checkups and nonstop fussing over broken fingers and cracked ribs and weight loss, Hank hadn’t once mentioned any kind of telepathic rehabilitation, hadn’t even asked if he had rebuilt his shields or if he could sense basic emotions or if he remembered any new details about the experiments that had been done on him. The children were so excited to have him back that they hadn’t even asked for the silly telepathic movies he’d sometimes eased into their minds instead of bedtime stories, or the blanket of calm he’d instinctively laid over the house at night to help them sleep. They wanted to hear his real voice, be reassured that he was home and safe, and were full of their own stories besides—training with Alex, science experiments with Hank, a treehouse they’d built themselves. To hear them talk he’d been gone forever, not two weeks that felt like forever. Even Erik, after his ill-advised intrusion into Charles’s mind that first afternoon, had hardly mentioned telepathy except idly, little conversational barbs thrown out but never pursued in any kind of meaningful discussion.

Raven called when she could, Erik hadn’t left, the children were as perfectly behaved as children could reasonably be expected to be, and Charles had become adept at disguising his flashbacks and shaking off moments of disorientation. It wasn’t perfect, but it was more than he had ever thought he’d have again. 

And if there were times when it all seemed fragile, so easily lost—when he followed Erik’s raised voice into a room to find him on the verge of exchanging blows with Alex, or Ororo wouldn’t stop crying because she missed her mother, or Raven asked to speak to Erik about Brotherhood business—well, those moments passed, and nothing had escalated so far that Charles’s presence couldn’t deescalate it again. Something about that was surprising. Charles had never been such an imposing figure that people accepted his authority without question, but perhaps it was simply lingering concern over his captivity, not wanting to upset him.

As if Jean’s blunder had been a bad omen, the day only went downhill from there. Charles didn’t always join the students for lunch, as it had a tendency to get raucous and he still found too much noise and movement difficult to process, but he made the effort and regretted it before ten minutes were up. 

“Scott stole my chips!” Ororo shouted in the middle of Hank’s quiet explanation of the Blackbird’s new shields.

“Did not!”

“Did too!”

Seeing she wouldn’t back down, Scott changed tacks. “It was _one_ , stop being such a baby!”

“It was _mine_ , you jerk!”

Alex tried to broker peace by making Scott apologize and give Ororo part of his cookie, but she wouldn’t take it, more outraged by the injustice of the theft than the loss of the food, and before long Charles had a splitting headache and a whole host of regrets that he hadn’t simply taken a sandwich to his room the way Erik did. He was so preoccupied with rubbing his temples in an effort to will away the pain that he missed whatever threat Alex used to bring everyone under control, but even complete silence for the rest of the meal wasn’t quite enough to help him regain a sense of equilibrium. 

The flashback he had later that afternoon was the worst he’d had in days. During an NBC broadcast on the ongoing violence in Northern Ireland, a split second of newsreel footage, the remains of a bakery after the detonation of an IRA landmine, matched almost perfectly to a memory that wasn’t his. Nearly all explosions looked the same in the aftermath, but this time the baker’s name was Yiddish and the emotion associated with the memory was sadistic glee. He’d never seen that place or felt that emotion but it made no difference; he’d been in the mind that had. 

Like a razor-sharp hook had been plunged into his gut and yanked hard, he felt himself wrenched back into that mental cesspool as if he’d never left it, those sick, slick thoughts curling around his weakened powers and sapping them of what little strength remained. That nauseating closeness persisted as the perspective shifted and he—or both of him—looked down at the ground from the height of a grown man standing up—though how that could be made no sense, since to his recollection none of the experiments had had any effect on his paralysis. He felt the muscles in his legs move in a strangely distant way, almost like he was using his own body as a puppet, and everything was colored with the red slickness of rage and adrenaline that he had come to associate with memories of phencyclidine. 

When he came out of it he felt ill, shivering and sweating like he’d come down with the flu, bad enough that he mentioned it to Hank at their appointment a few hours later.

“I know I’m missing things from that day, the day they gave me PCP,” he said, obediently swallowing the painkillers Hank gave him. “And something about this—I was standing, Hank, I could feel my feet on the floor, and I’d gotten free of the restraints, somehow. The experiment must have gone wrong.”

“There’s a page missing from the notes Erik stole from the facility,” Hank said. “It’s the results write-up for that day. They must have done one, their record-keeping was impeccable.”

“It’s gone? Stolen?”

“Or removed on purpose. Maybe the higher-ups didn’t want anyone knowing what happened who hadn’t been there. All we know for sure is that the tests stopped after that. It’s the last experiment in the file.”

Charles shook his head, probing at the edges of the memory. “I’m sorry, there’s nothing else. I remember looking down at myself, realizing that I’m standing—and then it goes black, like a film cut off mid-frame.”

“Well, that’s more than you knew this morning,” Hank said. “It’ll all come back, Charles. Remember, each piece is progress.”

All told, Charles was a wreck when he finally made it back to his room that night. Erik must have felt him coming, because the door swung open before he could reach for it and pushing his wheelchair suddenly took almost no effort at all, but Erik’s back was turned and he seemed entirely engrossed in pouring two glasses of scotch until Charles had transferred from chair to the couch and mastered the sudden, strange urge to cry.

“Rough day, darling?” Erik said, only a little snidely. He handed over one of the glasses and raised an eyebrow when Charles took a gulp instead of a sip.

“You know, some people would interpret your refusal to be sociable, hiding in your room, general skulking, lurking, and so on, as troubling signs of a delayed adolescence or some such, but I’m beginning to think you have the right idea.”

“I skipped adolescence,” Erik said. “I was very precocious.”

“Yes, you took to murder and mayhem ahead of all your chums.”

“I skipped chums, too.”

Charles managed an exhausted huff of laughter, tilted his head back against the cushions, felt the tight knot of anxiety near his diaphragm begin to uncoil, just enough so that he could breathe more easily. At first he’d hardly dared say anything to Erik at all, vacillating between the serious and the saccharine, terrified that one wrong word would drive him away without warning; or worse, drive him away at the end of a vicious argument where they both said unforgiveable things and Erik vowed never to come back. But as the days passed they had relaxed around each other enough to tease, even bicker amiably. Charles wondered if Erik’s sense of humor had always been like this—dry almost to the point of bitterness, so self-deprecating—or if something about his years in prison had changed him. He was slower to anger than he had been, quicker to change subjects or lose threads of conversation. He no longer bothered to feign politeness, even half-heartedly. Nothing seemed to truly infuriate him and everything seemed to annoy him and Charles had finally given up trying to keep track of what and why. They were both taking it day by day, and that was enough. 

He drank most of his scotch with his eyes still closed. Erik put on a record without ever getting up from his chair, something slow and vaguely psychedelic. 

“I was in the library today,” Erik said after the first track ended. “Found this tucked away on a top shelf.”

Charles blinked as the old chess set floated onto the table between them, balanced on a metal disk that dissolved and reformed into an ash tray as soon as it had done its job. It was the set they’d used the night before Cuba and countless times before that, simple compared to some of the more outlandishly expensive sets stored around the mansion but emotionally resonant in a way none of those Italian marble or solid brass monstrosities could manage. Erik had stuck coins to the bottom of the pieces so that he could move them with his powers, said it balanced out the lightness of the wood.

“Oh,” Charles said stupidly.

“You would have had to ask Hank to put it there for you. You didn’t want to see it. You didn’t even want to think about it. Why?”

 _It was that or burn the damn thing_ didn’t seem like a particularly diplomatic response. “For the same reason you found the set on the plane almost immediately even though it was hidden in a locked compartment completely out of sight, I’d imagine.”

“I was looking for it, and it was there.”

“Well, I was looking for you and you weren’t,” Charles said without thinking, relieved when the words came out tired instead of sharp. 

Erik simply nodded; he didn’t take offense and he didn’t apologize. Having done both once, he hadn’t seemed inclined to do either again since he’d arrived—since their argument on the plane, really. Instead he stood up, refilled both their glasses, and when he turned back he was frowning, more puzzled than irritated.

“I’ve been here for two weeks. Why haven’t we played yet? It was literally doctor’s orders.”

Charles shrugged, took a more restrained sip this time. He could already feel the scotch taking effect, warming his stomach, calming his racing thoughts. He wanted to lie down and use Erik’s surprisingly comfortable chest as a pillow, not argue about chess or push his already-strained synapses past exhaustion to something worse. “I haven’t exactly been at my sharpest. Wouldn’t have been much of a challenge.”

“You never are. That’s not an answer,” Erik said. 

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.” With a sigh that sounded distinctly childish, even to his own ears, Charles struggled through his memories of the past few weeks. “Well, it’s not my fault. I’ve sent you for the board before, I know I have, and you’ve never come back. Always distracted by something.”

Erik tapped the side of his glass with a fingernail, repetitive and arrhythmic. “That doesn’t sound like me.”

“Yes, well, I lied to Jean earlier today and blamed it on Hank, and that doesn’t sound like me either, but I think considering recent events occasional moments of aberrant behavior are to be expected, don’t you?”

His tone had been joking, but Erik looked at him strangely for a moment. Charles knew he’d seen that expression before but couldn’t place it until Erik looked away and devoted the entirety of his attention to his next sip of scotch—that right there, that deflection, always came after a flash of distrust, old habit from the days when Erik had tried to shield his suspicious thoughts by piling mundane observations about anything else on top of them. Charles almost wanted to protest at the unfairness of it all—stretching the truth to spare a child’s feelings surely didn’t warrant such skepticism, and Erik must know Charles would never lie to _him_ —but if he asked Erik if he trusted him and Erik said no…

Well, it would hardly be unexpected, but that wouldn’t make it any less unbearable.

“Let’s have a game now, then,” he said instead, forcing cheerfulness.

“I’d like that,” Erik said, smiling. 

He was good-tempered after that, solicitous and almost sweet, pivoting between conversational topics with all his old wit without ever losing focus on the game, and by the time Charles tipped over his king he wondered if perhaps he hadn’t imagined that moment of suspicion after all.


	13. Erik

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning for non-con use of telepathy from here on out technically, sort of?

“We have a problem, Mystique.”

Erik spoke quietly, cupping his palm around the telephone receiver. The whole floor was asleep—Ororo was the closest, clutching her teddy bear with metal button eyes three doors down, and Charles the farthest, his watch warming his wrist on the other side of the wing. Still Erik had locked the library door with his powers, pitched his voice at nearly a whisper, and knew even that might not be enough precautions.

“Don’t tell me you and Charles are at each other’s throats already,” Raven sighed heavily, though she didn’t sound particularly surprised.

“We’re not.” That, at least, would be familiar; that, he could deal with. “He’s regained his powers.”

A sharp inhale, a breath of silence, and Raven still couldn’t hide the relief in her voice. “Oh, my God. Oh, fuck, I’m glad. I thought they’d really broken him—”

“He doesn’t know it.”

“That makes no—What are you talking about?”

“He doesn’t know his telepathy is back, he doesn’t know he’s using it— _I_ didn’t know he was using it until tonight and I still don’t know how long it’s been going on. Since the beginning, for all I know. The children, the school, _me_ …Everything is the way Charles wants it to be _because_ he wants it to be that way. His conscious mind is still terrified of his powers, unwilling to even think about them, but his subconscious mind has been guiding us, _manipulating_ us, this whole time.”

Erik’s hissing whisper edged toward hyperventilation and he broke off to gather himself. He glanced at the door—closed, locked, no one approaching—and still couldn’t shake the paranoid conviction that he wasn’t alone in the library. Of course he was, he’d checked every nook and cranny before placing the call to the number Raven had given him, but he had spent the entire evening with Charles desperately pretending everything was normal and now that he was finally allowing himself to feel it, his anxiety was as sharp and painful as bolts of lightning arcing through his veins. At least he knew that was real; there was no mistaking the texture of his own fear after two months spent fighting it every time he entered an enclosed space or someone touched him without warning. 

“Erik? Erik, are you still there?” 

Erik wrenched himself back to the present moment, guided by Raven’s worried voice over the line. “Yes. Yes.”

“Are you sure about this?” she said. He could hear her doubt and, beneath it, the beginnings of uneasiness. “I’m not saying I don’t believe you but…I mean, how could you possibly know?”

“You haven’t been here, Mystique. The children don’t just stop fighting when he enters the room, they go silent. I’ve walked away from arguments with Havoc because I’ve forgotten what we were arguing about. Beast has spent half an hour asking Charles about the range of motion in his _pinky finger_ and never once mentioned his powers. We wouldn’t have played chess tonight at all if I hadn’t found the board accidentally, without him knowing. When he doesn’t want something to happen, it _doesn’t happen_. I should have seen it long ago.”

But he hadn’t, because he hadn’t wanted to. Erik could see that now. He had been content, and he wasn’t entirely certain all or even most of that had been the result of telepathic manipulation, no matter how insidious and undetectable. Some of his happiest memories of the past few weeks had been so unremarkable: reading on the balcony while Charles napped beside him, long runs around the grounds, recreating his mother’s recipes half from memory and half by intuition at night once everyone else had gone to sleep. Things he had dreamed of for a decade—nothing outlandish, nothing impossible, just the simple, uncomplicated pleasures of home. Surely those feelings had been real, even if Charles had influenced some of the events that led to them, keeping away interruptions or sharpening Erik’s memories without either of them realizing it. 

And the moments when something felt wrong had been so rare and unobtrusive that it had been easy to attribute them to his own lingering instability. He’d certainly had enough mood shifts and moments of forgetfulness before coming to the mansion; why should now be any different? How easy he had been to convince. He’d practically done Charles’s work for him.

Raven cursed again. Even if she didn’t entirely trust him, she had always trusted his instincts. “He’s got you all playing house in a little mutant utopia and he has no idea? Erik, this is bad.”

“As I said. I can’t stay here. Tell me where to find you.”

“Not happening,” Raven said immediately. “He still needs you, especially if he’s this far out of control. Now that you know what’s happening you can be careful, resist his influence.”

“I’m not going to be your _spy_ , Mystique, not when he could make me forget all this tomorrow _by accident_ ,” Erik hissed, hoping he sounded angry instead of panicked. 

“And what do you think is going to happen if you leave, Erik?” Raven said sharply. “What do you think is going to happen if you tell him?”

He felt liked he’d been punched in the solar plexus, a blow so real he pressed his hand over the skin and half-expected bruises. He swallowed heavily. “What?”

“Don’t bullshit me, or yourself. We both saw his face when you walked into the room at that base. He barely knew his own name but he knew you. You ground him more than Hank, more than the school, and if you run away from him now he’ll be devastated and alone in that house with a bunch of kids. If anything would force his telepathy from subconscious to conscious, that would do it. You’re the only one who knows first-hand what happens then.”

“You think he’d—”

“I _don’t_ think we want an unstable telepath climbing into Cerebro in search of you, let’s start there,” Raven said. “And I think he won’t let you go as easily as he did in Cuba. And who told him to fight harder for the things he loves?”

“You can’t think he would hurt them,” Erik said flatly, forcing his mind away from _the things he loves_. 

It was unimaginable. Watching Charles interact with the children over the past few days—while lurking around the corner, usually, because he didn’t want to draw their attention, for fear of becoming their new plaything—he had been struck by Charles’s gentleness, his patience. The same Charles who still said “I don’t remember that” multiple times a day with all the fearful wonder of someone who was a stranger to his own life, who looked at Erik every morning like he’d expected him to slip away in the night and his continued presence was a gift, the same Charles who was vulnerable and hurt and prone to nightmares pulled a veil of serenity and confidence over himself the instant any one of the children shouted his name. Whether it was a skinned knee that needed bandaging or an art project they wanted to show him, he was there. Part of it was pride, of course, not wanting to appear weak in front of them, but most of his unlikely well of strength and enthusiasm came from real affection. Charles loved his students, cherished their mutations, and would sooner use his powers against himself than them.

Which, if he lost control entirely, might well happen. When he’d accidentally attacked Erik, the backlash had knocked him out too. 

“Honestly I’m more worried about what it would do to him,” Raven was saying, echoing his own thoughts. “But if there was a—a ripple effect, or something, he wouldn’t mean to, and he’d hate himself for it. Sometimes we lose control and our mutations hurt people, even if it’s the last thing we want.”

“Subtle, Mystique,” Erik said scathingly. 

He could practically hear her rolling her eyes over the phone. “You promised me you would take care of him, Erik. You’ve never lied to me before, don’t start now. If you tell Hank he’ll just put Charles back on the serum. He’s still the best of us. He hasn’t done anything wrong.”

“You’re the one who said this was bad,” Erik reminded her.

“So help me make sure it doesn’t turn catastrophic.”

“By lying to him. By lying to everyone. By letting him rummage around in our heads rearranging the furniture according to whims he doesn’t even know he has.”

“Please, Erik. Just for a little longer. Then I’ll be back and we’ll figure it out together, the three of us. Just don’t…scare him.”

Erik rubbed his hand over his face with a little too much force, half-hoping this was a bad dream and he would wake up next to a Charles who didn’t justify every reservation Erik had ever had about the potential danger of his powers. He had worn the helmet for fear of exactly this scenario: Charles innocently, casually violating his mind and him not only not fighting it but embracing it. Every instinct was screaming for him to tell Raven no. It was the conversation in that Florida motel room all over again—his world had just been upended, and her response was to ask too much of him, and only the thought that perhaps she viewed it as asking Magneto for something entirely within reason kept him from refusing at once. She had gained so much strength over the past decade; she didn’t need to know how much he had lost.

“You’ll owe me,” he said after a long silence. 

“I’m good for it,” Raven promised, so relieved that Erik couldn’t make himself say any of the cruel words crowded on the tip of his tongue, barbs about how it was easy to be brave when she wasn’t the one in danger, how even his jailers hadn’t managed to steal what she was asking him to sacrifice, how hypocritical this was of her when she’d thrown Charles out of her head long before he had put on the helmet. 

Instead he hung up abruptly and paced the length of the library for a few minutes, alternating between tugging at his hair and gesturing at the various metal knick-knacks around the room until he was orbited by a cloud of silver and brass and gold trinkets. The easy use of his powers helped him back down from the edge of hysteria; the two fingers of expensive whiskey he swallowed in a few gulps helped more. He poured another two fingers and took that glass more slowly, thinking about how far away he could be by morning, how the _possibility_ of danger to a handful of people who either didn’t like him or didn’t know him was hardly sufficient motivation to put his entire selfhood in jeopardy.

Then he tried to put himself back in those moments that hindsight had shown him had been telepathically manipulated, searching for some common thread among them. A shiver down his spine, a sense of wrongness, a sense of _rightness_ that he could pinpoint as false, the pulsing warmth that used to accompany Charles’s telepathic touch—anything out of the ordinary. 

Surely Charles wasn’t so powerful now that he could pass entirely unnoticed through all of their minds simultaneously. His presence had been palpable before, ineffable but unforgettable. Erik remembered the feel of it, not a caress so much as the platonic essence of one, warmth and light and softness and yet none of them at the same time. Anticipation and dread had had him on edge these past weeks, constantly combing through his own thoughts in search of that presence, craving it at least as much as he feared it. If Charles had passed beyond that—if he could be in any of their heads at any time—

That was a shiver down his spine, and it didn’t come from Charles. Suddenly Erik needed to see him. He threw back the rest of the whiskey, flipped the library lights off absentmindedly with his powers as he strode back down the long hallway.

Charles was exactly where he had left him: lying on his back in his absurd silk pajamas, one arm thrown over his head, face turned toward Erik’s side of the bed as if looking for him even in his sleep. Even though he now shaved every day they had somehow never gotten around to cutting his hair, and he looked even younger than he had the night they had met in the water. Awake the new lines around his eyes and mouth were always sunk deep; asleep they smoothed out and no one would know to look at him that he could turn them into a houseful of blank slates. Erik sat down on the edge of the mattress, not quite daring to touch him. 

He was the most terrifying, arousing thing Erik had ever seen. 

Charles turned his head on the pillow, and as he blinked open blue eyes cloudy with sleep something crystalized in Erik’s mind. He knew exactly what he should do, could see the events laid out in front of him like they had already happened. He should write two notes, an apology to Charles and a warning to Hank, and slip away now, quietly, as fast and as far as he could. Somewhere rural, where there would be no collateral damage if Charles’s telepathy came hurtling across the country in search of him. 

“What are you doing up?” Charles mumbled sleepily, brows knitting with innocent confusion.

And Erik knew exactly what he _would_ do. 

He framed Charles’s face with his hands, knew the impression of feverish heat against his palms was in his own mind, pressed a gentle kiss against his slightly-parted lips.

“Getting a glass of water, _schatz_. Go back to sleep.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“Just the one. Everything’s fine now.”

He would ensure that the return of Charles’s powers was less traumatizing than his own had been. He would sleep next to him at night and bring him cups of tea during the day and gently pressure him into chess games until he stopped physically and telepathically shying away from the emotional intimacy of it. He would protect Charles from Hank the way he had failed to ten years ago and Charles would have his school and he would regain control of his powers—the _how_ on that was a little hazy, but Erik had never let unknown variables concern him overmuch when he was strategizing—and no one but him and Raven would ever know how close Charles had come to destroying them. And he would do it all because of the smile Charles gave him at the end of the day, small and sad like he was saying goodbye every night, and the light in his eyes when he saw Erik the next morning. He had power over Charles as surely as Charles had power over him, and the best place to utilize it was right here. If they could destroy each other, perhaps they could protect each other just long enough to thwart total disaster.

And if the worst case scenario came to pass, as in Erik’s experience it usually did, and Charles went off like a nuclear bomb as his captors had intended—well, he’d always hoped Charles would be there when he died. 

He hadn’t felt this calm in years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wish fandom was like, a bar, so I could buy all you shots and figure out why you're all reading this story, but since it's not and I can't I'll just say thanks :)


	14. Charles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik talks to baby mutants. Charles remembers a bad thing.

Something was wrong with Erik. 

He was standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee halfway to his mouth like he’d forgotten about it while Ororo held up her latest homework assignment with both hands, her eyes flitting between the page and his face to gauge his reaction. “Paint how your mutation makes you feel,” Alex had said, and Ororo had drawn the mansion under a giant storm-cloud of sparkly purple crayon with silver lines between the cloud and the house. There were two small stick figures to the side.

“—and the professor says our mutations are cousins because of electromagnets and my mutation makes me feel big like I can stop bad things from happening, so the cloud is me, and the metal spikes are you, and everyone else is inside the house and we’re making them safe!” 

“Cousins because of electromagnets,” Erik echoed. “Charles told you that?” 

“Uh-huh! Do you like it?”

Erik crouched down to her eye level and gave the drawing the same cool, assessing stare he gave metal objects before he used his powers on them, a look that indicated absolute focus and usually inspired intimidation if not outright fear in lesser grownups. Ororo bore up under it bravely.

“Yes,” he pronounced finally. He looked from the drawing to her worry-scrunched face and added very seriously, “I wouldn’t dare fight anyone who could make those clouds. Who are we protecting the school from?”

“The bad people who took the professor,” Ororo said, in a tone that implied she hadn’t really thought about it. “And anyone else who thinks we shouldn’t practice our powers and go to school and play without being scared.”

From his hiding place around the corner Charles saw the wheels turn in Erik’s head, the words gather at the tip of his tongue, and it didn’t take a telepath to know that the next word out of his mouth would be “humans,” because even when playing art critic for a ten-year-old Erik had his mind on the war he was so sure he saw coming. His cognitive dissonance was complete and unhesitating: he could tell himself that he was fighting to preserve Ororo’s innocence and groom her to fight alongside him at the same time. It would have been infuriating if it wasn’t also so terribly sad. Erik had the veneration for childhood of someone who had never had one and the militant mindset of someone who thought of his life as a mission.

He could also be snide about “the professor and his school” as much as he wanted, but when he saw an opportunity to convert he could be more pedantic than any Oxford don. 

But just as Charles was about to intervene, Erik visibly reconsidered, then closed his mouth and smiled instead. 

“You’re very right,” he said, standing up to his full height again. “Your powers are beautiful and you should use them however you like. Though maybe a little less flooding in the back yard, yes? It’s hard to play in a swamp.”

“Sorry,” Ororo said sheepishly. “I’ll try to do better.”

She scampered away, leaving Erik in the kitchen making a face at the first sip of his now-cold coffee. Charles attempted to retreat surreptitiously as well, though wheelchairs weren’t designed with covert getaways in mind. Still, he was more proficient than he had been, was building up calluses on his palms and knocking into doorways less often, and he managed to make it down the hall and into the study in near-silence. Impressive, considering how preoccupied his mind was with replaying the conversation in the kitchen. Erik talking to his students should have been his worst nightmare and instead it was simply…odd. 

The children had been as fascinated by Erik as he had been determined to avoid them for weeks now. They had more questions about “Mr. Magneto” than Charles’s impaired memory had answers to—where had he come from, what was he doing here, was he a new teacher, why wasn’t he all dressed up like on TV. Charles had hedged and half-answered until one day Scott had asked him if Mr. Magneto would help them make repairs on the treehouse, and without input from his brain his mouth had answered, “Well, you’ll just have to ask him, won’t you?” 

The glare Erik had given him when they met in the library later that evening had said that Scott had done just that, and not only survived to tell Ororo and Jean about it but inspired them to do the same. 

“Every time I think they’ve run out of questions they prove me wrong,” Erik had sighed. “They’re certainly yours, Charles.”

“So long as one of us is sure about that,” Charles had said. 

That day—and plenty of others since—he had been plagued by self-doubt. The children were so young, so untrained, and even though they had only been at the mansion for two months and objectively he couldn’t have forgotten _that_ much about them, they still felt like inquisitive, demanding strangers. He wasn’t sure what they wanted from him; he wasn’t sure what he had to give them. There did seem to be a school developing against all odds around him, with classes and homework and fixed mealtimes and training periods, but Charles couldn’t pinpoint his part in all of it. The idea of teaching a class himself was overwhelming; doing nothing at all was intolerable. And calling himself the headmaster of a school for mutants when he had no functioning mutation of his own was simply absurd.

Some days were easier. The children were sweet and sensitive and it wasn’t much of a hardship, being asked to read to them or watch them practice their powers. Scott was earnest and still young enough to worship his older brother, Ororo’s fearless energy was often contagious, and Jean was sensitive to his moods in a way that felt considerate, not suffocating. He had a feeling she had been his favorite even if he couldn’t quite remember why. 

Still, he could understand Erik’s consternation at being their new favorite plaything. 

Erik tried to mitigate the attention, still taking his meals in his room and avoiding the common areas when he could and spending long stretches of time on the edge of the grounds, but it had still become a not entirely-infrequent sight to find him making a sandwich for Scott or watching variety shows with Jean. He answered questions succinctly, asked them politely, never pandered to the children or treated them like anything but miniature adults.

He also wasn’t as subtle as he thought he was.

“Why are you using distancing mechanisms on children?” Charles had asked one day after Ororo had asked Erik for help with her math homework and he had refused, sending her in search of Hank instead, crestfallen. “You like them, I know you do. It’s not a crime.”

Erik, who didn’t seem to understand how deep Charles’s fear of his telepathy ran, had said suspiciously, “How do you know I like them?” 

“For God’s sake, I can see it! Especially when you’re trying to pretend you don’t. You get this—look.”

“I get a look,” Erik had repeated flatly. When Charles had ignored the clumsy attempt at deflection and simply kept glaring at him, offended on Ororo’s behalf, Erik had grown somber quickly. “Charles, I think we both know it’s for the best if your students don’t grow too attached to me.”

“Oh,” Charles had said weakly. “You couldn’t have beat around the bush on that one just a little?”

Erik had shaken his head and smiled a little, less an answer to the question and more in gentle judgment of Charles himself, and put him in check for the third time that chess game. 

They hadn’t talked about it anymore after that. The past was difficult enough and neither was ready to let go of the present; let the future wait, Charles thought, and Erik seemed to agree in his own way. Every so often he would make a comment about the children or the vegetable garden or future modifications to the house that implied impermanence, like he wouldn’t be there to see it, but the comment never became a conversation. Charles understood intuitively that this was deliberate. Erik was trying to acclimatize him—or both of them, perhaps—to the idea that his departure was inevitable before it became imminent. Each too-casually dropped hint would have prefaced a screaming argument years ago, with Erik accusing him of trying to trap him in a fantasy world and Charles shouting back that warmongering wasn’t the answer either, but recently Erik went out of his way to avoid antagonizing Charles at all. 

Perhaps it was just the houseful of children, but he reminded Charles of a little boy ringing a stranger’s doorbell and running away before he had to face consequences. There was something very charming about the idea of a young, mischievous Erik.

“What’s so funny?”

Erik leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, radiating a combination of skepticism and fondness. Charles hadn’t realized he was smiling to himself; now he directed the smile at Erik instead.

“I was imagining you playing ding dong dash,” he said.

Erik looked even more skeptical. “I don’t know what that is, but it sounds…unnecessary.”

“Well, it is, I suppose, but that’s not the point.”

“I’d be very much surprised if there was a point at all,” Erik said absently, his mind clearly on something else. He wandered further into the room, flipped through one of the science journals on a side table with deliberate nonchalance. “You know, if you’re going to spy on me, you might not want to do it while sitting in a chair I can feel from half a mile away.”

Caught, Charles blushed, but made an effort to defend himself anyway. “I wasn’t spying! I overheard the two of you and didn’t want to interrupt. Ororo wanted to talk to you, not me.”

“Yet somehow she ended up talking to both of us, she just doesn’t know it.”

“Are you upset about that, or about the picture?” Charles said, well aware that the question was an underhanded, distinctly immature, and not-very-subtle attempt to deflect the conversation from his own shortcomings to Erik’s. Erik knew it too, from his well-practiced raised eyebrow. 

“I’m not exactly…thrilled, about the picture,” he admitted. “It’s flattering, of course, and she’ll make you a fine X-Man one day, but there are…misapprehensions I feel I should correct. Things she doesn’t understand. Oh, you needn’t worry, I won’t interfere—educating students is your job, _professor_. 

“But I do find it…unpleasant, to be monitored. To know that there are eyes on me, tracking my every move. It’s like being back in that plastic box. Do me the favor of trusting me a little, Charles? I think I’ve earned it.”

Erik spoke so carefully these days, with a strange kind of circuitousness like he occasionally got lost in his own sentences, that it took Charles a moment to process the second half of his response and understand the trauma that it revealed. Of course Erik would be sensitive to the fact that he was being watched; his behavior had been constantly, critically scrutinized for ten years, and he had been punished whenever it didn’t meet standards he had never known but which were in all probability entirely arbitrary. There was a reason he spent so much time alone, away from prying eyes, in the open air. His request for a basic modicum of trust was entirely understandable—and impossible to grant. 

After all, Charles had trusted Erik twice before, and both times he had been left bleeding in the middle of carnage Erik had created in a barely-thwarted attempt to start a war he couldn’t win. And that had been an Erik whose motivations he understood, no matter how much he disagreed with them; this Erik was unpredictable, prone to more moments of gentleness and vulnerability than Charles had thought him capable of but also given to panic attacks and instability, claustrophobia and new nightmares. And Charles’s captivity had left its own scars—he was more guarded now, less patient, subject to his own mood swings. He couldn’t imagine trusting Erik when he didn’t even trust himself.

So he obfuscated, because the truth was cruel. “I trust you as much as you trust me, my friend.”

Erik’s eyes widened; he could count on one hand the number of times Charles had called him that since his rescue. 

“Fancy a game?” he said, instead of pointing out that Charles’s answer wasn’t an answer at all. Shying away from a fight again. 

And, again, Charles let it happen.

“Yes, of course,” he said, pushing his chair over to the table while Erik reset the board with a casual wave of his hand. 

They played several times a day now, mostly in the evenings after the children had gone to bed but sometimes when there was a lull in the morning or afternoon schedules. Charles enjoyed it more than he had expected to the night Erik had first found the game, dusty and untouched for longer than he could remember. If there was any one object that symbolized the most painful time in his life, aside from his wheelchair, it was that chess set. The sight of it in the study during those hellish years had been a constant, unbearable reminder of everything he had lost, and an echo of that bitterness had made his chest ache distractingly during that first game. Because of it Erik had beaten him badly but Charles had improved after that, to the point that they were evenly matched again.

He was winning this time when, halfway through the game, with no exterior trigger at all, the flashback hit. 

There was no time to brace himself. One second his right hand was outstretched to move a bishop; the next it was clenched into a fist, nails biting into his palm, as he thrashed against restraints that were loosened just enough to taunt him with the idea of freedom. 

This was familiar. This was real. So uncertain about so many of his memories, he knew that this had happened, was happening, would always be happening. His body hurt. His mind hurt. His entire world was pain in so many different colors and textures he lost count and there were whispers—one outside his head, one inside it, one a memory, a thousand more, and he was reasonably sure a few of those voices were real.

_Thinks the only good mutant is a vivisected one._

_As if he could ever love anyone more than he hates me._

_Inferior American scientists—take off an arm, those useless legs, and see how long his sanity lasts._

Charles screamed until his voice cracked and he choked on his own saliva, a wail that was drowned in the redness behind his eyes. He had been seizing for more than a minute now, he could stop breathing at any second and he would have considered it a blessing, but then another wave crashed over him. Rage, this time, toxic and liberating at once. It wasn’t his—he’d never allowed himself to feel rage like this, clinging white-knuckled to peace because his anger could destroy the world—but he made it his, the way he could make every feeling and every thought in the world his, if he wanted to. He could fit the entirety of humanity into his skull and snuff out lives by town, occupation, religion—in any order or amount he pleased. Perhaps he’d begin with the American and Russian crews who’d fired on the beach during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Surely the world would thank him for ridding the gene pool of such idiocy.

But first he’d start with the shriveling Nazi worm to his left, because he was very tired of this place. The helmets worn by everyone else around him were an inconvenience and for the first time in days he thought of Erik; if only he were here Charles would borrow his power and boil their blood in their veins, pull it out through their pores, explode their hearts, something that would send a suitable message that it was best to treat mutants nicely, in the future. Sadly he had to make do with the one unshielded mind available to him. Charles’s command that the man free himself wasn’t easily obeyed but he was very persuasive, and wrists broke rather easily after all. 

Their minds were entangled like vines deep in the jungle now, heavy and wet and improbably strong for all their individual weakness. They were one man in two bodies, and nothing had ever felt more natural than exerting total control over another human being. Charles made a few quick adjustments—silenced vocal chords, cut off his pain receptors before he went into shock and rendered himself useless—and they were in business. 

For about thirty seconds. Four, five technicians. Charles wasn’t keeping track but there was quite a lot of blood on both his faces, and at least some of it was his own. He was free now, or free for the second time, and the door was closer now than it had been—and then a flash of new-old pain that he recognized as a gunshot wound and suddenly half his body was a separate body again and there was a dead man lying on the ground next to him.

And Charles was in his study throwing up onto his mother’s Persian rug.

He was also shaking so badly that it was almost like another seizure, or a continuation of that same one, and only Erik’s sudden presence at his side kept him from shaking right out of his wheelchair and on to the ground.

When he blinked the vomit-induced tears out of his eyes and sat up on his own, he heard himself gasping the same words over and over again: “Oh God, oh God, oh God—”

“ _Charles_ ,” Erik snapped, sharp with fear. “Tell me what’s happening. Tell me what to do.”

“Oh God,” Charles repeated, mindless, teeth chattering, and somewhere sane in the very back of his mind he reflected that he hadn’t seen Erik this scared since the beach. Then, with a gasp like there was a finite amount of oxygen in the world and he wanted all of it, he managed, “There was a man—felt like Shaw, his mind, Erik, and I was in it and I couldn’t get out and I killed him, I _was_ him and I killed him and it was so—”

Another pair of gasping breaths, until the right word came to him.

“—easy. It was so, so easy.”


	15. Erik

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dark!Charles is less dark and more of an asshole

Erik knew when he was about to die. Throughout his life there had been several moments, confluences of events, that should have ended him. He recognized that instant when adrenaline became acceptance, when inevitability stronger than himself took over, when he knew that even though it wasn’t in his nature to stop fighting there was no point now. It was the closest thing he could imagine to peace in this life, felt only briefly at its very end. He remembered every time he had closed his eyes never expecting to open them again and chance or luck had intervened, and the flicker of confusion when he realized he got to keep living. Had to keep living. It was a difficult emotion to pinpoint, sometimes.

When Charles choked on air and hunched over himself, nails digging into his temples, Erik closed his eyes again. He had seen flashbacks but never one like this, one that looked like it was actually ripping Charles’s mind apart. If Raven’s hunch had been right and Charles was a bomb just waiting to be triggered, the moments before the end for all of them would probably look like this. And if it hurt them as much as it looked like it was hurting him, they’d all be in agony.

But once again Erik opened his eyes and continued to live. 

The sound of Charles vomiting painfully snapped him back to the moment; whatever had happened was over, but he’d not come out of it unscathed. Erik was by his side in seconds and watched, helpless, for a full two minutes as the retching continued before Charles recovered enough to speak. His whole face was wet. Sweat beaded on his forehead, eyes leaking tears, nose running, saliva dripping from his chin—Erik itched to reach out and wipe it all away, to hide some of that evidence of vulnerability from the world because what good was he if he couldn’t protect Charles. Through sheer force of will he held back, unsure how safe it was to touch at all. 

Charles was muttering to himself, low and garbled and despairing, still trembling but cognizant enough that Erik hoped he could hear him.

“Charles? Tell me what’s happening, tell me what to do.”

He meant it as a command; it came out like a plea, fragmented and frantic. 

On the edge of a sob, Charles gasped, “There was a man—felt like Shaw, his _mind_ , Erik, and I was in it and I couldn’t get out and I killed him, I was him and I killed him and it was so—easy, it was so, so easy—”

Erik barely heard a word, after _Shaw_. Ten years on and that name still had power—to render him silent, ten years old again, paralyzed with fear and anger even though he’d seen the light leave the bastard’s eyes himself as he bored a hole between them. But Charles knew minds and a mind like Shaw’s was out there in the world and his stomach turned thinking of it—

And then the rest of it registered. 

Charles had killed a man. 

“You didn’t have a choice. They didn’t give you a choice,” Erik said immediately. He had killed lots of men and was inured to it but he remembered his first deliberate kill and he knew the look of nauseated self-hatred on Charles’s face. And that was the normal guilt of taking a man’s life, without the added shock of being in his head while it happened. In the horror of revelation Charles hadn’t been very clear—had he been trapped before or after the death? Because of it or despite it? Did it matter? Erik suspected it didn’t, for the very immediate future. There was a hysteria building behind Charles’s eyes that didn’t bode well for any of them and for the first time Erik wished he had as much of a talent for calming Charles down as he did for aggravating him.

“I need you to take deep breaths, Charles.” 

Fuck caution, Erik decided, they were dealing with bigger problems. He put one hand against Charles’s face and ran the fingers of the other through his hair, hoping to ground him with physical contact. It had worked in the past, when he had come out of Cerebro overwhelmed by his powers and barely connected to his body, but this…this was without precedent. He could only hope.

Charles didn’t push him away. He didn’t seem to notice the contact at all. He was shaking his head now. “It was so easy. I never knew it could be so easy.”

“It wasn’t you. You’d been tortured for weeks, you weren’t yourself. The Charles I know would never think killing is easy.”

“Killing?” Charles looked puzzled, like Erik was the one not making sense. His eyes flickered around the study, pupils pinpricks in a sea of blue, and his breathing came harshly and at odd intervals that Erik didn’t like. “I meant controlling someone like that. Making their body my own. Stepping into someone’s skin is like…putting on a new pair of trousers. Nothing simpler. I hadn’t known.”

Erik was trying to remember to breathe himself, to keep his body language relaxed and soothing and not betray how terrified he was. Charles could very well be the most powerful mutant in the world and that was difficult enough to accept when he kept himself leashed by that preposterous moral code. So many times Erik had wished he would bend it, just a little, just enough to help their people, but he had been so foolish. A Charles with no boundaries wasn’t an asset. He was a devil. A Charles who fully embraced his power the way Erik urged all other mutants to could slip from body to body like a wraith and if he saw nothing wrong with it then none of them were safe.

“Listen to me, Charles,” he said firmly. “In all the time I’ve known you you’ve never treated your mutation with anything but care and concern for the people around you. You’ve never seen people as objects. You respect their wishes even when what they ask of you is unfair or impossible.”

“I was—”

“Right,” Erik interrupted. He wasn’t sure he could bear it if Charles agreed with him under these circumstances. If he got everything he’d wanted on that Cuban beach like this, he’d lose Charles just as surely. “You were right. To be careful. Just because something is easy doesn’t make it right.”

“And yet you keep killing.” Charles was eerily calm for a moment. Then the tears spilled over again like they’d never stopped. “Oh, God, Erik, what did I do—”

“Nothing you would have chosen,” Erik repeated, because it was all he could do. 

It wasn’t enough. Charles had gone from devastated to rapt and back to devastated and looked ready to ricochet between the two again, with no indication that he was actually processing the trauma of the new memory at all. Much as he hated the idea, Erik knew when he needed reinforcements.

“I’m sorry for this, my friend,” he said, and with a gesture levitated Charles’s chair to hover beside him as he made for the lab downstairs. He didn’t allow himself to run, in case he passed any of the children in the halls, but his strides were long and fast. Charles was in no state to protest; he had swung back to something like catatonia, staring fixedly at nothing while his lips moved soundlessly. By the time Erik was taking the stairs down to the lab two at a time with the wheelchair bobbing after him, Charles was smiling instead, manic with a touch of bewilderment.

Hank saw that smile and burst into action without a single glance at Erik. 

“This way,” he said. He led them to a small room behind the infirmary, probably once an office or large storage closet and now outfitted as a small but homey bedroom. The bedframe was a dark wood, the sheets striped white and blue. On the walls were generic posters of Einstein, the Parisian skyline, Hollywood blockbusters from the 1950s. There was also an assortment of medical equipment clustered around the bed, which Hank lifted Charles into like he weighed nothing, positioning his dead legs on the mattress and piling pillows behind his back.

“We’ve found it helpful to have a place to give medical aid that doesn’t look like a hospital or a lab,” Hank explained absently, seeing Erik’s confusion. “Since that’s been the source of the damage, a lot of the time. Helps to have comforting surroundings. What happened?”

“He remembered killing someone,” Erik said bluntly. He gritted his teeth, hoped Charles wouldn’t hear him, but they didn’t have time to tiptoe around the issue. “It must have been the missing page, the last experiment. He took control of someone’s mind and they died. He couldn’t give me the details. He’s not himself.”

Hank nodded, took it all in without looking away from Charles. He took a penlight from the tray on the dresser and spoke clearly, carefully. “Charles? I’m going to take a look at your eyes now. How are you feeling?”

Charles shuddered and winced away from the light; his pupils remained contracted, the blue irises luminescent, almost otherworldly. “Hank? What are you doing here?”

“Where do you think you are, Charles?”

“I’m—I was—” Charles blinked several times, like he was trying to dispel shadows or phantoms that existed only in his field of vision. “I was back there. I was with the General, I was standing up—”

“Was there anyone else there?” Hank asked. Erik hated him for a moment; that he had been the one there when Charles’s telepathy had malfunctioned before, knew the right questions to ask and how to phrase them to get through to Charles even at his most incoherent. He wanted to shove the kid aside and take the seat on the mattress by Charles’s side at least as much as he wanted to get out of the room, the mansion, the country, as if any distance would be great enough to hide him from Charles if he was determined to find him. 

“Yes, there was another person,” Charles breathed, like he was remembering it for the first time. Then he went still again, cold and serpentine, smiled like jagged ice. “Well, I say _person_. Perhaps that’s overly generous. Used to perform unnecessary surgeries on children for the Third Reich, drown kittens as a boy, you know the type. Our old friends the CIA kept him busy after the war doing some _very_ interesting biochemical weapons research. What was his name—something anglicized beyond all recognition. Oh, yes! They called him Vince but he still thought of himself as Wenzeslaus. Can you imagine? Sadly he thought to begin a third career with the Soviets and, well, you know how forgiving the CIA can be, don’t you, Erik?”

Erik had backed up a few steps without meaning to, as if Charles’s words had been a physical force pushing against him, forcing him away. He felt sickened, swallowed heavily, couldn’t find the words to convey any of the emotions tangled and writhing in his stomach. 

“They put you in a Nazi’s head?” Hank said, horrified and beginning to comprehend. 

“I put myself there,” Charles corrected. “Not on purpose, of course, but the alternative was hardly better. Total telepathic suppression was beginning to…wear on me, you could say.”

“Oh, my God,” Hank said. He sounded shattered.

Charles laughed, an oily slick of darkness underneath the surface delight. “Yes, that’s what I said. Erik doesn’t seem to agree. You don’t believe, do you, Erik?”

“How could I. You know what I’ve seen,” Erik said through numb lips. He wanted to tell Charles to stop. He wanted to cry or run or wrap that IV pole around Charles’s neck and squeeze. Instead he felt frozen, watching this creature with the cold eyes and unnatural composure use that familiar mouth to speak viciously callous words, drops of acid into the part of his mind that still throbbed like an infected wound whenever he remembered his mother’s body hitting the floor, his people taken away and never seen again. 

Suddenly he remembered other words, from before when they were in the study. _I was in it and I couldn’t get out and I killed him, I_ was _him_ , Charles had said. Erik wondered if he was speaking to Charles at all, if there hadn’t been some fragment of that other man trapped in his head all this time, like a glass splinter stuck under the skin that throbbed only when direct pressure was applied to it. If it was even possible, it would explain so much—and then he could reassure himself that the vindictive streak that was directed solely at him wasn’t how Charles really felt, deep down. 

“Charles, how does your head feel right now?” Hank was asking.

“It—I—oh, like I’m standing at the top of a very, very high building,” Charles said. He was warm and human again and sounded more himself, shaky and unsure but struggling for control despite his own uncertainties. Because if anyone was going to be a fucking martyr, Erik thought, it was Charles Xavier.

“Do you feel any change in your perception of your telepathy? Do you think there may be a chance that it could manifest?”

Now was the time to speak. Erik knew it as certainly as he’d known he ought to run the night he’d spoken with Raven. He needed to pull Hank aside and tell him that it already had, that Charles had been influencing them all this time like a benevolent god but this cold sneering thing was an Old Testament nightmare and he couldn’t be allowed to continue what the real Charles had so innocently begun. This version of Charles _hated_ , and his hate could burn their brains to cinders.

But Charles stared up at Hank like the question was unthinkable and shook his head wildly. 

“No, it can’t manifest, it’s too dangerous, I’m too dangerous. I used him and discarded him like he was nothing, Hank, and just because I didn’t shoot him doesn’t mean I didn’t kill him.”

“You didn’t shoot him? But how—?”

“I thought he could help free me—they kill them anyway, the General said, even if I protected them throughout the entire test it wouldn’t matter in the end—and the PCP made me so, so angry. So I took him over as an—escape vehicle, I suppose. He carried me. We didn’t even make it to the door. He was shot and I got out of his head right before he died. I felt it but I didn’t, you see?”

“I see,” Hank echoed automatically, clearly struggling and failing to find his feet in a world where Charles equated a man with a getaway car. “You were experiencing psychosis at the time, though, as a result of exposure to an incredibly unstable narcotic, and your system is clean now. I really don’t think you need to worry about that type of reaction again, professor.”

“Don’t you?” Charles said shakily. Then his eyes went to Erik and his tone changed. Silky, now, as he said it again: “Don’t you?”

Then Charles’s body shimmered and splintered into two bodies, one remaining reclined on the pillows while the other stood up like that wasn’t an impossibility. 

“Hello, darling, dearest, liebling,” the second version of Charles purred. The first seemed frozen and so, when Erik allowed his gaze to shift from this new threat for a split second, did Hank. The Charles who could stand swayed forward like he was drunk and unsteady on his feet, though the same motion might have read as seductive if the idea of seduction hadn’t seemed so alien to this moment. Erik kept his expression carefully blank but Charles tilted his head and Erik got the sense that he’d seen past that weak façade and soul-deep with no effort at all. He knew with the same intuitive understanding that he’d been judged, and found wanting.

“Oh, you’re not well, are you, my love,” Charles said. 

“Neither are you,” Erik said. 

“On the contrary, I’ve never felt more myself. I’ve limited myself so unnecessarily all these years. Remaining trapped in that broken shell when I had access to every other body on the planet—or I could simply bypass the need for one altogether, like this. You couldn’t understand, with your perfectly functional—and frankly very pleasing, aesthetically speaking—physical form. Your mind, though…it’s all cracked, isn’t it. You’re a broken teacup, darling.”

“That’s my concern, not yours.”

Whatever else he was, this Charles at least had the insufferable verbosity of the original, and it calmed Erik enough to stop his own emotional whiplash, unearth a steady thread of irritation from the depths of his fear and confusion. 

“Of course it’s my concern. I just want you to be happy. You’ve had so little happiness in your life.”

“Stop it,” Erik hissed.

Charles came forward again, almost within arm’s reach now. “Stop caring for you? Never. I’ll fight you our whole lives and never stop caring for you.”

“Stop _saying_ these things.”

Charles ignored him entirely. “What would it take, darling? To make you happy. To let you rest.”

White walls surrounded him again. He reached out with his metal-sense and there was nothing, just that throbbing pain like a bruise deeper than skin or the itch of a phantom limb. For the first several years he had panicked like every time was the first time, struggling against the total deprivation for even the slightest brush of steel or iron, not caring if his captors saw. The futility had worn on him, the pain becoming so constant he barely noticed it, and he had become obsessed with perfect impassivity, refusing to show a hint of distress or discomfort to the eyes that watched him so relentlessly. He screamed himself hoarse but only in his head. Even his dreams were filled with screams and even as he heard them again Erik couldn’t tell if Charles’s words or Charles himself had triggered this memory. 

“Get out of my head,” he said automatically, just in case. “You know what it would take. You’ve always known. Safety for _all_ mutants, not just the lucky few you’re hiding in this school. The respect, the—compliance, of the humans.” And then, because Charles looked like he was _listening_ for once, Erik added the one condition he’d rarely admitted even to himself. “And you, by my side. I still want that. Even though I know it will never happen.”

“Who says it will never happen? Who says anything needs to happen that we don’t want to? Who made that decision?”

Charles looked so confused, so heartbroken, that Erik clenched his fists to keep from punching the expression off his face. He forced back the tears that threatened to form too but allowed a bark of bitter laughter to escape. “You did, Charles. On the beach when you sent me away, when you wouldn’t even ask for my help after I crippled you for life, you made that decision. And I gave up hope long ago that you would ever change your mind.”

“What if I did?” Charles pleaded. “What if I could give you that hope again?”

“I can only hope you’d never be so cruel,” Erik said. “You’d turn your back on me again the moment I took necessary action that conflicted with your pro-human agenda and I don’t know that I could bear losing you a second time.”

“Like I could bear losing you,” Charles said sadly, so close now that even at a whisper his words were perfectly clear. He had always been a few inches shorter than Erik but he seemed almost tall now, after Erik had become used to his height in the wheelchair. He barely had to look down at all to meet those blue eyes, found them warm and welcoming in a way that sent shivers down his spine. It was too like the real Charles. He couldn’t look so like himself and say things like, “All this pro-human nonsense…I’m simply saying genocide would give me an awful headache, darling. Telepath, you remember? The death throes of millions would lay me up for days if it didn’t make me go stark raving mad. Besides, surely we can use some of them. Build our brave new world out of whatever mutants and humans we please.”

Erik’s head thunked lightly against the wall as he ran out of space to back away from Charles’s slow, steady advance. The tremor in his voice would have been undetectable to anyone but the telepath mere inches away. 

“You don’t mean that.”

“You’ve never been terribly good at parsing what I mean, love.” Charles smiled, a conspirator’s grin. “How many times did I have to invite you for a drink in my hotel room before you realized that what I really wanted was to tear that stupid turtleneck off you?”

“Too many,” Erik admitted, not quite able to suppress his own small smile in return at the memory of those long evenings spent talking, drawing out the second and third glasses of minibar whiskey until the conversation and alcohol both ran out and there was only an anticipatory, humming silence. Once he _had_ figured it out, it had been its own kind of gratification, savoring that kinetic energy and knowing that what lay on the other side of that potential would be even better. He had said goodnight each time knowing that Charles wanted him to stay, wanting to stay himself, testing both their resolves with the most pleasurable kind of denial he’d known in a life full of it. 

Again, he wasn’t sure if that surge of memory came from himself or from Charles. The past merged with the present; Erik opened his eyes to find Charles’s hands at his hips, their bodies slotted together like perfectly-matched puzzle pieces, and with Charles’s face turned into his neck he could feel his lips move with every perfect, poisonous word.

“Let me help you, darling. You don’t know which way is up, do you? You’ve been alone for so long.”

Erik closed his eyes again. It was easier to ignore the brimming tears that way; easier to pretend the strange frozen tableau across the room didn’t exist and Charles’s promises, his unbroken body, and this easy intimacy were the only reality that mattered. 

“I can feel how it’s changed you,” Charles murmured. “You’re so close to the edge. One solid push and you’d go flying. You could be a new man, Erik. You could be happy, you could rest.”

Neither man moved, but every muscle in Charles’s embrace went rigid at once. Erik’s breathing, so deliberately calm and steady, hitched. Fear this total didn’t feel like fear at all; it felt like ice, like numbness, like resignation. There was no point in pushing Charles away physically or mentally—a few feet, a few miles, they’d make no difference, and Charles was already so deeply enshrined in his every thought, swimming in his dura matter, stroking telepathic fingers along every nerve ending, that Erik doubted he’d ever truly be out of his head again. He tried to pretend his shudder at that thought was disgust. His face was still pressed into Charles’s hair and he was vaguely aware of the strands shifting with his breaths as he spoke. 

“No, Charles. I don’t want that. Are you listening to me? It has to be my choice. You would want it to be my choice.”

“But you make such bad choices, darling,” Charles pouted. A fond smile curled against Erik’s neck, like Charles found this to be an adorable personality quirk, like he wasn’t casually contemplating rewriting an entire human being. 

“They’re still my choices,” Erik said. “Don’t take them away, Charles. Please.”

“You’d thank me.”

“I wouldn’t.” Erik willed it to be true. He cast about for a distraction, hoping to derail this dangerous train of thought, even if he had to return to one that was far more painful. “A minute ago you were going to fight with me for the betterment of our people, we were going to build the future, change the world. Let our victory make us new men, together.”

Charles sighed heavily, leaned back just enough to stare at Erik with that same exasperated fondness he remembered from their countless teasing arguments. Not the vicious fights—the simple squabbles with no real stakes. It was a look that implied Erik was an idiot but Charles loved him anyway. “Why must you make everything so difficult? Why can’t we just forget the world and the fight and the future—it’s all so tiresome. You’re the only one I care about, the rest of them are just…noise. Why listen to them at all?”

It sounded so simple, so perfect, when he said it. Suddenly very tired—of their arguments, of being confused, of being so engaged in this mad, toxic world at all—Erik tipped his head forward so that their foreheads rested together and without thinking breathed, “Just because something is easy doesn’t make it right.”

Time, which had been narrowed to the present like nothing had ever mattered but this moment, expanded again at those words—words that sounded familiar because he had said them before, and remembering them he remembered the thought that had accompanied them, about the danger of a Charles with no boundaries.

This, here, was exactly that danger.

“You’re not real,” he said, against all the evidence of his senses. He looked across the room to the form in the bed and Hank standing like a wax statue of himself, not blinking, his breathing barely noticeable. “You’re over there. You have a body, you have people who depend on you, you have a school to run. You can’t walk away from that.”

“Oh, I think you’ll find, darling, that I can do pretty much anything I like,” the image of Charles disagreed. His smile wasn’t friendly now; Erik wondered if phantom fingertips could press hard enough to leave bruises, or if he was only being made to think that nails were digging into his skin. He took a moment to savor the slight pain, to inhale the smell of shampoo and soap that rose off the illusion’s skin, to look deep into eyes that he would never see from this position again. He had to end this before they spiraled even further out of control, though he wasn’t entirely certain if he was acting to stop Charles or to stop himself when he leaned forward and murmured, “So can I,” as he used his powers to grab a syringe filled with sedative and drove it unerringly into the arm of the real Charles on the bed. 

The illusion’s face barely had time to twist into a snarl before it vanished into thin air.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry if this one seemed a little disjointed--I started it before vacation and finished it during vacation and writing angsty mutants is much harder when you're like, _soooo_ relaxed :)


	16. Charles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jean is a good nurse. Erik makes grilled cheese sandwiches. Charles eavesdrops when he really shouldn't.

Charles knew the difference between natural and drugged sleep by now, having experienced both so often in his (admittedly dubious) recent memory. 

He woke from natural sleep suddenly, with a gasp or choking sound and eyes so wide they looked pinned open. His heart galloped painfully in his chest and if his muscles were stronger he would bolt upright instead of his upper body simply twitching like a beached fish. More often than not Erik was nearby, still half-asleep as he wrapped an arm around him and pulled him close with a strength that would have been intimidating if it wasn’t so comforting. Charles calmed quickly then but those first few adrenaline-fueled seconds never got easier to bear.

Drugged sleep was a struggle to escape, presuming he could muster the will to try. Suffused with an unnatural, treacly calm, his thoughts twisted lazily like a mobile above a child’s bed, aimless, hypnotic. In the lab he had learned to sense impending consciousness without grasping for it, registering that his body existed and then training himself to fall back into the darkness. They had ways of waking him, when he was needed again. And then after his rescue, those first few days when physical or mental pain had intermittently necessitated a morphine drip, voices had whispered that he was safe, he could rest, whenever he had begun to regain consciousness until he had believed them. He allowed himself to drift away, over and over sometimes, until the morphine was out of his system and he woke with a gasp, shaking and terrified and himself again.

This was drugged sleep but as Charles floated up from the dark, closer and closer to his body but not yet touching it, he knew with the certainty felt in dreams that he had escaped the lab and not needed morphine for weeks. 

He blinked until his vision was no longer blurry, taking in the room as a series of still photographs: the row of hand-painted toy soldiers on the dresser, the reproduction of a 14th-century nautical Portolan chart, a poster for the 1963 film _The Great Escape_ with its block lettering and Steve McQueen on a vintage motorcycle. The room adjacent to Hank’s lab, and the heaviness in his limbs and molasses-thickness in his thoughts were the aftermath of sedation. He was alone and missed the soothing voices in an abstract way that evoked no emotional distress. Instead he accepted the sensory input calmly and drifted away again.

The second time he woke his head throbbed like he’d had too much to drink or mixed uppers and downers, the way he’d done too frequently during his decade of bad decisions. He groaned and it sounded cacophonous in his own ears, though logic told him his throat was dry and his voice could only be a croak, if that. Immediately there was a straw at his lips but he was only able to take three voracious pulls on it before it was gone again.

“Dr. McCoy says it’ll make you sick if you drink too much too fast,” a young voice told him sternly.

Charles forced his eyes open, found the only light came from a dim bulb in a standing lamp in the corner that barely hurt his head at all, turned his head to find Jean watching him like a small, concerned hawk. He tried to smile at her reassuringly but his lips were dry and cracked and the movement hurt.

Jean held out the water again, a little tremulous but eager to be helpful. 

After a few more sips he was able to rasp, “Thank you, Jean.”

“You should get some more rest,” she said with that quiet wisdom beyond her years, that was conjoined with and yet entirely separate from her ability to read minds. 

“Yes, nurse,” Charles said, pretending to pout. It made her smile as he’d meant it to and although his voice was still rough, almost unintelligible, speaking was better than the pain that would shoot through his skull if he nodded his acquiescence instead. Even this small interaction drained him; every muscle and joint and even his thoughts felt heavy and useless. He was crushed under a foreign exhaustion that he was just now finding the clarity to question—something had happened, he had done something, he remembered the library and flashes of trailing behind an agitated Erik and Hank shining a light in his eyes, but memory disintegrated after that. It was all fog and shadows. All he knew for sure was that Erik and Hank weren’t here now and their absence only intensified his rising dread.

“Jean, where are Dr. McCoy and Mr. Magneto?” he asked casually, carefully.

She tilted her head, listened to the silent room for a moment in a way he recognized as her telepathy unfurling. Sounding far away, she said, “Dr. McCoy fell asleep in the lab. He stayed up all night, he’s worried about you. Mr. Magneto has been on the roof all morning. He’s scared.” She blinked as she came back to herself; the blankness that took over her expression when she used her powers was replaced by a confused frown. “Why is he scared?”

“I don’t know,” Charles said honestly. 

In fact he doubted very much that _scared_ was an accurate description of Erik’s mental state. When Erik was truly frightened he lashed out against the threat or vanished until he had control of himself again; he didn’t brood on rooftops. But Jean didn’t know how to read the intricate web of feelings and associations that comprised Erik’s mind and had pulled out the first dominant emotion she encountered, which meant that Erik was unsettled enough that fear colored his surface thoughts but not so terrified that he had left the mansion. Charles found some small reassurance in that.

He would have been more worried if the sedation still hadn’t weighed so heavily on him. Hank was only in the next room, Erik just a few minutes away, but they felt so far removed, miles distant. His small bed in this small room might as well have been on a different continent. He wanted to grasp for them with all the desperation of a man drowning at sea but they would never reach him in time. 

He wished he could remember why his head hurt so badly. 

There was a small voice telling him not to worry, to just rest, and he obeyed it gratefully.

He woke for the third time panting and sweat-soaked. He felt entirely present in his physical body, could envision with perfect clarity the blood pulsing in his veins, heart convulsing in his chest cavity, his adrenal cortex kicking his dopamine levels into overdrive. At his waist the paralysis began and every sensation vanished. His legs might as well have been logs or dead things; it seemed impossible that they belonged to the same body whose upper half thrummed with such a textbook fight or flight response. Nothing outside his body made as much sense as the familiar physiological reaction unfolding within him. The mattress beneath him was too soft and there was no one next to him, which was wrong too. He threw a hand out, his breathing loud in the quiet air, and patted the empty bed as if expecting to find Erik tucked under the folded blankets somehow.

“Charles?” Hank said from the doorway, and Charles’s unseeing gaze flew to him and then focused. Hank was in his natural form, blue and steady and reassuring.

“Hank,” he said, relieved. “I—wasn’t Jean here, just a moment ago?”

“You slept for a few more hours. She wanted to skip training in case you woke up again but Alex said you wouldn’t approve.”

“Good man, Alex.” 

Charles calmed quickly in Hank’s presence. His energy had changed during their decade of isolation, less nervous and self-conscious, more grounded and self-possessed. His intelligence had sharpened where Charles’s had dulled. At his most overwrought, Charles trusted Erik to protect him, but he trusted Hank to engineer an actual solution to the problem and the problem, at the moment, was what exactly he was doing here.

“There are some…gaps, in my memory,” he admitted. 

“That’s not surprising,” Hank said, arranging pillows behind his back so he could sit up properly. “You had quite an episode.”

“In the library.” Charles remembered that much. Grasping for memories was futile and frustrating; he closed his eyes instead, relaxed, let them float to the surface of his mind, tenuously connected like water lilies across the surface of a pond. “I was sick all over the rug. Erik brought me here. I must have been in some kind of shock.”

“You regained another memory, a pretty traumatic one.” Hank paused, clearly about to ask if he had lost it again but wary of triggering another episode.

Charles hadn’t lost it and was almost glad, especially since distance and drugs had softened its edges enough to make it bearable, like a grainy newsreel he might have seen as a boy. This process of regaining and losing the same memories again and again, reliving the trauma each time, always surprised and horrified anew, was exhausting and, he was beginning to realize, counterproductive. Even damaged his mind was agile enough to hide the most painful truths from him, but that protection of his sanity and his understanding of himself came at the expense of his ability to heal. Now he forced himself to remember, though he allowed himself the weakness of euphemisms.

“The last experiment. Yes, it was very…vivid.” 

“We can talk about it later,” Hank said. “But you know it wasn’t your fault, don’t you?”

Charles could see what had happened as though someone else had done it and felt a kind of morbid fascination, a clinical curiosity toward the type of person who could do what he had done. The kindness in Hank’s voice made him vaguely nauseous. “I know I was compromised. That’ll have to be enough to go on for now, Hank.”

“That’s fine, professor. What else do you remember?”

“Very little, after coming down here. The shock, I suppose. I remember talking to Erik but not what we talked about, and I—I was sedated, wasn’t I?” 

That was less a memory and more a logical deduction. Hank nodded in confirmation but even with his facial features distorted by his natural form Charles could read the confusion in his expression.

“What is it, Hank?”

“I was actually hoping you could help me fill in some gaps there,” Hank said, clearly discomfited by the not knowing. “I’m not the one who sedated you. I remember asking you about the possibility that your telepathy might manifest and that made you agitated and then I don’t remember anything, really. There’s a blur, like I drifted off mid-conversation. Next thing I knew you were unconscious, there was a syringe full of tranquilizer in your arm, and Erik was across the room looking like he’d seen a ghost.”

“What did he say?” Charles asked because it was expected. In truth he didn’t want to know. He felt a shiver go down his back from the top of his neck to the point where the paralysis set in. This conversation was going in a direction he didn’t like and couldn’t control but there was no way to turn from it without turning back to the memory of playing puppetmaster with another human being. 

Hank hesitated, then relented. “He said, ‘Be careful.’ And then he left. I haven’t seen him since.”

Jean had said that Erik was on the roof, and scared. Charles said, “I don’t remember what I did to him.”

He did have an image of Erik with his back against the wall across the room, but it was from his full height and was thus impossible. The wheelchair had been taken away; he couldn’t have left this bed. But nonetheless the image was there: Erik with his head tilted back, his mouth open a little, like a cornered animal who had accepted the inevitability of the kill and relaxed into it. There was something giving about his posture, an anticipation in his eyes. Erik always had been better acquainted with that Freudian thanatos than anyone Charles had ever met. He only sought to do something noble, make some great sacrifice, before he gave into it. Normally the sight of Erik like this would have inspired a swell of pity for him; when his rage was banked at its very lowest and his serenity shone at its brightest Charles could see what could have been if not for Shaw and forgave Erik everything. But now the image—memory?—was overlaid with something predatory, something Charles didn’t like to think himself capable of but had to admit that he was, if he was ever to accept what happened during that last experiment. Whatever else he had done, he had seen Erik as something to be devoured, to be bent into whatever shape he wished, and he couldn’t remember what had stopped him. It might only have been the sedative.

“The one thing Erik’s never been is shy about communicating when he wants you out of his head,” Hank was saying thoughtfully. “Jean said he hasn’t left the grounds and the helmet is still locked away so whatever you did can’t be that bad, can it?”

“Unless I made him think it wasn’t,” Charles said. 

“Don’t make yourself out to be worse than you are. At least talk to him first.”

As Charles should have expected, it wasn’t that easy. A few hours later when Hank had given him a clean bill of health on the condition that he took it easy for the rest of the day, he found Erik in the kitchen making lunch for Scott, Jean, and Ororo. He stopped his wheelchair in the doorway, shocked, taking in the sight of Erik at the stove laying out slices of buttered bread in a frying pan, adding slices of sharp cheddar cheese that began to bubble as they melted, then flipping them with a spatula that he never touched. Charles had seen him devote equal attention and precision to far more complicated recipes than grilled cheese sandwiches. Next to him Ororo had been given the responsibility of stirring a saucepan of tomato soup; he gave her instructions in a low voice and she nodded seriously, mimicking his posture and behavior in a way Charles doubted was entirely conscious. 

“Professor, you’re up!” Jean noticed him first and ran over to throw her arms around his neck before she became embarrassed by her own display of emotion and pulled away quickly.

“Yes, I’d overslept quite long enough, don’t you think?” Charles said, aiming for a kind of cheerful self-deprecation. 

He didn’t miss the unreadable look Erik shot him before he turned back to his task.

“You’re just in time for lunch,” Erik said casually, like nothing about the past night or the current situation was at all bizarre. “How do you like your grilled cheese?”

“Lightly toasted, please,” Charles said automatically, to buy himself some time. 

Erik nodded. “There’s coffee. Or the kettle is still hot if you prefer tea.”

“Thank you.”

It gave him something to do and made the silence that settled busy instead of awkward. Erik handled the children well, brisk and businesslike but careful to give them all responsibilities so no one felt excluded—he told Scott to set the table, Jean to pour everyone glasses of milk, steadied Ororo’s grip as she poured the soup into a tureen that had belonged to some obscure Xavier relative. He barely looked at Charles at all, then or while they ate and the children filled him in on their training and morning classes, peppered with questions about his absence that he answered as vaguely as possible.

Perfectly timed with the end of the meal, Erik said, “The dishes are all yours, Charles,” and vanished without waiting for a response.

As he rolled up his sleeves and plunged his arms into the soapy water up to the elbow, Charles reflected that of course Erik would consider it a viable strategy to use the children as barriers between them to avoid a conversation he didn’t want to have. He probably considered it more mature than taking refuge in a place Charles couldn’t physically follow; and besides, his guilt hadn’t yet allowed him to take advantage of the disability he had caused. But the children were fair game and so, Charles was willing to bet, were long runs, assorted house projects, and volunteering to go to town for groceries, a task Erik usually avoided like the plague. 

Charles’s own guilt was still sharp enough that he allowed the particularly unsubtle avoidance for the rest of the day. He needed to know what he had done to Erik, what Erik had done to him, but there were so few answers that wouldn’t make him a monster and reveal new reasons for Erik to distrust him. He clung to his delusions for the final few hours he could and tried not to wonder if Erik would sleep somewhere else tonight. 

In the evening he found himself in the small study next to the library with a large glass of scotch pondering the dangers of his telepathy, renewed in his conviction that he was a threat to everyone around him. That had always been true but some wall had been torn down, some animal part of himself let loose. He would shed no tears for the dead Nazi but the next time he lost control it might not be someone as guilty as that man, or as strong as Erik. His shields, which had been decimated after his rescue, had begun to rebuild themselves naturally—his mind guarded itself against the loudest thoughts and strongest emotions instinctively, it seemed—but they were still flimsy things. He could build them higher. It would muffle the world, cast a sheen of unreality over all his senses, but if it was necessary to protect the people he loved then he would do it without question.

He nursed the scotch with a moroseness Erik would normally have mocked him for until he caught the murmur of a familiar voice from the library next door. The temptation to wheel closer and press his ear against the wall was impossible to resist; he couldn’t make out the words but recognized Erik’s tone, the clipped cadence he used when he was agitated.

Charles barely took the time to rationalize that he had already crossed so many boundaries today that one more invasion of privacy could hardly matter before he was wheeling out of the study and to the cracked door of the library.

“I need you here,” he heard Erik say. “His powers are expanding exponentially. Projections, mind control, even unconsciously. Emma was a shadow in comparison.”

Charles frowned at that word, _unconsciously_. If he was using his powers in his sleep, he hadn’t known it.

Erik was quiet for a moment, then snapped, “The humans are the least of our worries if what happened last night happens on a mass scale. The whole war, forgotten in an instant because he needs peace or he loses his mind.”

Another pause. A sigh.

“Not without raising suspicion. Nor do I want to. It’s…magnificent, in a way. The power of total annihilation…I felt it turned on me and it was transcendent. How can we begrudge him his natural state?”

A longer pause, and then a clear interruption:

“No, he doesn’t—he needs anchors, he needs people he can trust, and I need to know my thoughts are still my own. I had your back when you asked me to, now it’s your turn. Appoint a second-in-command and come back to the mansion, Mystique, or I _will_ come to you.”

Charles couldn’t bear to hear any more; he backed away silently and returned to the study, downing the rest of his scotch in two gulps. Whatever total annihilation meant, he had threatened Erik with it and rattled him so severely that he had turned to Raven. He could hardly count that as a betrayal when he was so clearly responsible but it sent a stab of pain through his chest regardless.

He could only ensure that it didn’t happen again, so he closed his eyes and began to build his flimsy shields as high as he could.


	17. Erik

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik copes with the aftermath of his last chapter, is sleepy, chases Charles around some dreamscapes.

“Try not to do anything too—you know, just anything, don’t do anything until I get there—” 

Erik hung up in the middle of Raven’s sentence. He had explained the situation, delivered his ultimatum; any further time spent in conversation with him was better spent packing. Raven was more herself than ever but there were still flashes of Charles’s baby sister sometimes—both Xavier siblings had that compulsion to get in the last word.

Silence settled in the musty air as Erik braced his arms against the mahogany desk and bent his head over them. Low-level paranoia had kept him alert all day, half-expecting to see that phantom Charles with his burning blue eyes and insidious promises every time he turned his head, but Raven’s voice had settled him and he began to realize that he was exhausted. The adrenaline rush that had filled him after the events in the lab the night before had kept him awake until nearly dawn. He had paced restlessly for the first hour or so, then read the same few pages over and over before going down to the Danger Room to reduce several plastic mannequins to piles of neatly severed limbs using the now-unnecessary hinges from the door he had welded shut behind him. The metal had cut into his thumb when he tested its new sharpness and the smell of blood had reminded him of Cuba, how Charles’s blood had stained the sand, and of those days beneath the Pentagon when he had punched the white walls to remember color. Blood meant things were real. He could trust it not to lie to him.

He had slept for an hour around sunrise on a couch in one of the many rooms that would one day be a classroom but currently seemed to serve no purpose at all. His dreams had been disjointed and disturbing. They felt like outtakes of reality, possible futures he had erased when he plunged that syringe into Charles’s arm. In the last one he had let Charles take his soul with a kiss like in fairy tales; the last thing he had seen before it all went dark was the Charles on the bed waking up with eyes that looked like his own. 

Shaken, he had gone up to the roof after that and stayed there for hours, back against one of the countless chimneys and legs stretched out in front of him. Tried not to think about Charles and thought about him anyway. He had felt hopeless and then hopeful and then nothing, for a while. If that—conversation, for lack of a better word, had continued another thirty seconds, what might have happened? Raven had told him to sway Charles to their side and he had missed his best chance. They were equally susceptible to the lure of the other, half-convinced already for wanting to be so badly, but Charles had been bolstered by some dark will and Erik had been too entranced and then too alarmed to take advantage. 

He thought of the helmet and wondered how much of Magneto existed without it. There was no answer that wouldn’t evoke some type of self-hatred so he tried to forget the question.

After awhile he had locked away those thoughts and gone downstairs where with ferocious precision he had devoted half his energy to pretending everything was normal and half to avoiding Charles for the rest of the day. There was a thinness in him that felt ominous, like he had his back to that wall again but this time the pressure would only increase until he was crushed to the width of atoms. His hands trembled slightly and he kept close mental watch on his powers for fear of his anxiety leaking into the metal around him but by the evening he had nothing left and the temptation to contact Raven, which had been percolating since the Danger Room that morning, became overwhelming. If she had sensed the desperation behind his commands she had been tactful enough not to mention it. 

Now he wanted more than anything to sleep. 

“Be careful,” he had told Hank. He repeated it to himself but heard it in Charles’s voice. 

There were dozens of empty bedrooms in the mansion and any one of them would be safer than the one down the hall, where the right side of the bed was his and the nightstand held copies of Olsen’s _Maximus Poems_ and Heller’s _Catch-22_ alongside French editions of _Notre-Dame de Paris_ and surrealist poetry anthologies. Even if his current exhaustion rendered his panic abstract, Erik remembered that not twenty-four hours ago Charles had offered to kill him the way neighbors offered to water each other’s plants during vacation, like it was nothing. But for ten years, on countless rock-hard pallets in prisons he couldn’t name, he had dreamed of sleeping and waking next to Charles, and there was very little that would make him give that up now that he had it. His voice of self-preservation had always been more of a whisper, after all.

Still he breathed a sigh of relief when he stretched out his powers and found the wheelchair in the study next door. The metal was cool; Charles must have transferred to the sofa. On a normal night they would have found each other for a game of chess by now. He would have poured Charles a drink; Charles would be telling him some story about the children’s antics that Erik would pretend to be unamused by. 

But they could play tomorrow, talk tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow for as long as Erik allowed this charade to continue before guilt or Raven reminded him that he wouldn’t deserve this until he’d fought for it. 

He was too tired to think anymore. It was the kind of exhaustion that transmuted easily to sadness. Shadows gathered at the edge of his vision, creeping skittering things that weren’t there and human-shaped spectres with blue eyes. He went down the hall, already peeling his shirt off, barely remembered to throw his clothes over the armchair so they wouldn’t impede the movement of Charles’s wheelchair later, fell into bed, fell asleep.

“Oh fuck bugger damn it all,” accompanied by the sound of a wheelchair hitting at least three pieces of furniture, woke him four hours later.

Erik came awake reluctantly. He’d been so deep in sleep that his eyelids felt cemented shut. His mind was fogged over. The longer he stayed at the mansion the more rarely he came awake in an instant, the more often his nightmares were amorphous, a sense of unease, and not vicious monsters with teeth that haunted him throughout the day. He felt the body-warm metal of Charles’s wheelchair and watch approach the bed, heard Charles cursing under his breath again. Erik’s body turned toward him instinctively even as his mind whispered a warning. Half-asleep, he couldn’t remember the threat.

“Erik, if you moved the bloody furniture—”

“Yes, that’s certainly my priority at 3 a.m.,” Erik mumbled. “Please stop crashing into things.”

Charles crashed into the nightstand, which at least meant he’d made it to the bed. Erik managed the barest flick of his wrist and the wheelchair reshaped itself, one arm sliding down and the other up, then lifted into the air and tilted toward the bed, dumping Charles unceremoniously on his side of the mattress. 

“I hate it when you do that,” Charles pouted, making a production of arranging his blankets and pillows. In the rustling of fabric Erik heard his silk pajamas, smelled toothpaste overlaying alcohol. Getting ready for bed was a laborious process for Charles now, long and convoluted no matter how tired he was, and nothing Erik could have imagined when he’d sent the bullet into his back or condemned him for the serum. With Charles’s current clumsiness, the amount of knocking about he must have done, only the sheer size of their room and adjoining bathroom had let Erik sleep so long. 

“I’m very sorry, won’t happen again,” Erik said in the same drowsy monotone. 

He wasn’t but he had learned that it cost so little to say things he didn’t mean. Simple things, apologies, compliments for the children, sharing thoughts or feelings he would once have hoarded for no other reason but that they belonged to him. Charles saw through him in an instant but didn’t care. Not all gestures had to be grand.

“You’re not sorry at all, you lying bastard.” There was no heat in it; affection, if anything. 

Charles used his arms to move himself further down the bed, settling on his back the way he always slept before turning himself over periodically throughout the night, and Erik automatically molded himself into the curves and corners he now claimed as his own, when at first they had only registered as negative space. Wild, echoing caverns had existed in the inches between them at night, as impossible to breach as the distance that separated them ideologically, but Erik had been caged for ten years and knew now that freedom of movement was reason for hope in itself. Now he slept curled around Charles like a comma. There was tension in him tonight; his fingers pressed into the arm Erik had wrapped around his waist like they were searching for something.

After a few minutes of silence, just when sleep was close again, Charles said, “I am, though. Sorry. I didn’t—I wouldn’t—you didn’t have to stay. Did I make you stay?”

Erik sighed. “Charles…”

“Would you even know? Would I? If reality is what I make it then the only test is one of rationality and it makes no logical sense, you being here—”

His voice was a shade too loud, tone oddly staccato, like they were speaking from across the library and not while lying in the same bed. It grated and Erik tightened his grip just enough to shut him up. 

“It’s always been within my power to leave,” he said. “I’ve thought of it every day since I came here and I remain because I choose to. You haven’t brainwashed me, Charles.”

“Why aren’t you angry? You were always so angry before. The mere thought of—and now I’ve done it, you should be furious.”

Erik had thought the same. He had even tried to be. Down in the bunker disassembling mannequins, twenty-four hours ago exactly now, he had searched for that old friend within himself, had imagined its heat warming his blood as the rage that had kept him fighting all those years reignited. Charles had violated him. It should have been unforgiveable. He had pictured metal walls between them. The walls had become molten copper that bubbled and resembled flames, but there was no heat to them, they were illusory and ineffective. He had gone back to Dallas and felt again the fury and hatred that had consumed him when he had gone to his knees with the force of a ceramic bullet to the shoulder and looked up to see the SWAT team already surrounding him. They hadn’t even told him the president was dead until the charges against him were made public and he had been the last to know. He had earned his first prison transference that day after wrecking the facility beyond his plastic cell. Nothing had worked; the distance between then and now felt like the distance of eons. He had been nearly desperate enough to venture back in memory to the moment when Charles had said those fatal words in Cuba and triggered an anger that was irrational, obliterating in its force, but that memory was poisoned with shame and guilt. The purity of its rage was impossible to recapture. 

Instead of angry he simply felt cold, and Charles’s skin warmed him more than those futile attempts ever had. There were no words for any of this so after a long moment he simply said, “Don’t tell me how to feel. It’s presumptuous even for you.” 

“But last night—”

“Last night happened. It’s over.”

Charles laughed in that condescending way he had, again with greater volume and pitch than usual. “You know that’s not true, my friend.” He was silent for a moment, grew somber, and Erik had just enough time to hope that this uncomfortable conversation was over before Charles ruined it by adding, “You’re everything to me as you are, you must know that.”

“You hate the way I am,” Erik reminded him. Rolling his eyes would have taken more effort than he was willing to expend so he tried to convey his exasperation tonally instead. “I won’t play nicely with your little human friends and I’m given to wanton destruction of property and you’ll be convinced that I’m your enemy until the day your real enemy shows up at your door and you invite them in for tea like you have a hundred times before. And you hate my clothes.”

“The _capes_ , darling,” Charles said, hiding his smile in Erik’s hair. 

Erik noticed that he didn’t disagree with any of the rest of it. Charles had never enjoyed lying outright; he was guilty mostly of lying to himself in a way that was more wishful thinking than outright falsehood. He was naïve but not entirely delusional, though Erik never intended to admit that out loud. It came too close to complimentary. 

He also noticed that Charles clung to him tightly tonight and allowed himself to cling back, telling himself it wasn’t for his own comfort and had nothing to do with the need to replace the memories of that cold, powerful creature with ones of a warm, vibrant Charles who would tame his own bloodlust, not match it. Part of him wanted to cling still tighter, to roll on top of Charles and prove with fingers and lips and tongue and cock that they were real to each other even if the rest of the world was entirely senseless. After the eschatological horror of last night he needed to know that they could bare themselves to each other in every way and survive the fallout. But the rest of him had catalogued the clumsiness and odd speech and alcohol still on Charles’s breath and concluded that he was perhaps not entirely in his right mind. 

Erik thought of making a dry comment about past bad behavior and stopped himself, considering. It was odd. He had seen Charles in a wide range of altered mental states and this resembled a serum high more than anything else, but the legs entangled with his own were limp and unmoving.

“What have you done to yourself, _schatz_?” he murmured.

But Charles apparently wasn’t done with their earlier conversation. “It won’t happen again, Erik, I promise. I won’t put you in that situation again, I’ll control my powers better than that.”

“That would mean admitting you have them,” Erik said. 

“I’m confused, darling, not crazy. I do know that I’m a telepath, but it would be safer for everyone if I wasn’t for awhile.”

“What does that mean?” 

Charles was growing lax in his arms and didn’t respond, because of course conversations were over when _Charles_ decided they were. Weeks and weeks later and he was still too thin; Erik could trace the up-and-down slopes of ribs under his fingers. He sighed and closed his eyes too. They could come back to it in the morning.

But when he opened his eyes again it wasn’t morning. It was midafternoon and he was standing on the front steps of the mansion watching himself turn the satellite dish as a much younger Charles looked on with unbearable pride.

Erik blinked. He put his hand out and the mansion’s stone walls were cool under his fingers; he pinched himself, feeling absurd, and left white half-moon marks on his arm. The screech of metal filled the air as it had the first time, only this was the first time…

This was the birth of Magneto. The strength to control those missiles had lain dormant until this moment—the serenity that had anchored him as he’d bored that coin into Shaw’s skull hadn’t existed until Charles had unearthed it. Everything Erik had become had its inception here, now. He began walking down the steps, strangely mesmerized, watching the smile grow on Charles’s face and the tears in his eyes and wondering if he knew, if he had known, what he was unleashing. _A power no one can match, not even me_ , he had said, like it wasn’t quite literally the worst thing that could have befallen humanity. Like it wasn’t a fucking tragedy. This memory was one of Erik’s brightest; he wondered if it was one of Charles’s darkest, one he had played over and over again in the darkest depths of self-loathing.

Erik felt a sudden urge to step between these two young, stupid men and stop the scene from playing out as it had. He wasn’t prepared for Charles to move first—he’d thought himself invisible.

“Erik? You’re not supposed to be here.”

Puzzlement flashed across his young face. His pride and contagious joy had vanished in an instant. He was practically a child and Erik suddenly felt older than his years, with none of the wisdom that age was meant to engender. 

“So what am I doing here?” he said.

Charles looked away like he was running calculations in his mind. He didn’t seem pleased with the answers. Erik had forgotten how disconcertingly adorable his displeasure was; there was an innocence to it, as if every problem was a mere inconvenience, that Erik had long since robbed him of. “I don’t know. But I think you should leave.”

Erik had a surly retort at the ready, but the mansion grounds evaporated before he could speak and he found himself in a room he’d never seen before. Oxford, from the view outside the window. The air smelled overwhelmingly of cigarettes and cheap women’s perfume. Making himself at home—he had given up on trying to make sense of this, felt oddly relaxed about it—Erik wandered around, picking up various anatomical models, flipping through the papers on the desk, running his hand along the back of the cheap leather couch. The room was an awkward combination of classical and modern furnishings. None of the fabrics matched. What was expensive was worn; the rest of it was ugly, an assortment of chairs and lamps that might have been picked up at thrift shops. There was a tendency to warm colors but that was the only unifying factor. He could read Charles and Raven’s entire history in this catastrophic attempt at interior decorating.

He registered the voices in the hall as he was going through their medicine cabinet. There was nothing of Mystique in Raven’s girlish peals of laughter, but he’d recognize Charles’s dismissive drawl anywhere; he’d used it for mocking impressions of the CIA agents often enough.

Erik wasn’t posing, precisely, but the deliberate nonchalance with which he leaned against the bathroom doorway as Charles came into the apartment wasn’t entirely natural either.

“Hello, Charles,” he said dryly.

Charles’s eyes widened and he turned around and blurted, “Raven, if you could just—for a moment—” before slamming the door in her face. Then he stormed across the room, livid, and actually poked a finger at Erik’s chest. “Again? What the devil do you think you’re playing at?”

Erik was sorely tempted to laugh—young Charles was just too short and baby-faced to pull off physical intimidation—but he figured that would get the conversation off on the wrong foot, and he didn’t want a repeat of the scene at the satellite dish before he had his own answers. He did his best to be calm, soothing. “Before you send me away again I’d like to inform you that I’m not doing this. You’re the one in control here. I assume we’re dreaming?”

“But…but that’s impossible,” Charles stuttered. 

“That you’re in control or that we’re dreaming? I’d prefer an explanation for this that doesn’t involve time travel again, that’s all I’m saying, Charles.”

“No, of course we’re dreaming, it’s just—we shouldn’t be dreaming _together_. It shouldn’t be possible, our minds should be completely separated.”

“How could you know that?” Erik said, frowning. “Your powers aren’t functional. You can’t know what’s happening between our minds without using your telepathy.” 

Charles looked suddenly shifty. He backed away a few steps and went to the window, pulling aside the ugly tricolor curtains with their geometric patterns and looking down on the lamplit street. His nails tapped a nervous rhythm against the wood casing. “What if I couldn’t use it? What if I knew our minds were separated because I couldn’t join them if I wanted to?”

Erik remembered how oddly Charles had behaved when he came to bed, the strangeness of that phrase _it would be safer for everyone if I wasn’t for awhile_. With ominous calm he followed Charles to the window and repeated his own question, with what he considered an entirely justifiable slight variation on the endearment. “Charles. What have you done to yourself, you _utter idiot_?”

“Good Lord, you _have_ been talking to Raven,” Charles said, and somehow managed to wriggle out from under the arms Erik had raised to box him in. As he made for the door he threw over his shoulder, “Don’t worry, Erik, I’ll fix this.”

It was hardly a surprise when the Oxford apartment vanished too and another room he’d never seen materialized around him. 

Taking in his new surroundings, Erik immediately felt out of place. It was the opposite of Charles’s student digs: everything was antique and luxurious, made of wood hewn from medieval trees, silk and damask and velvet and leather so old it felt like butter. The air smelled of burning logs from a new-lit fire and beeswax candles and the complex flower arrangements in vases on the desk and bureau. There were tapestries on the wall, not paintings or photographs. Necessity in his life of hunting had made him a kind of chameleon—he could feign belonging in any place or among any kind of people, and he had never been intimidated by old money or fine manners. In the right clothes he could pass for aristocratic. But he was still Jakob and Edie Lehnsherr’s son and he preferred simplicity over grandiosity. When he couldn’t have that he chose sterility—interchangeable hotel rooms with loud air conditioners and rough towels and the same bathrobes for all guests. This had none of that. It was grandiosity disguised as simplicity, and done so perfectly he was almost fooled.

There was a whistling noise from outside and he had nothing to do but wait for Charles, so he went to the window and peered out. Whiteness, blinding, filled his vision; he could feel the cold permeating through the glass. The wind was so strong that the snow blew horizontally. So much of his childhood had been frigid, but even he had never seen a storm like this. He wondered what was beyond it—not a city, they must be either in the country or on the coast, but he had no way of knowing where or when. The howl of the wind was so loud that he almost missing the soft click as the room’s door opened and closed.

“When did you come here?” he asked. 

“I didn’t,” Charles said. “I always wanted to but it’s not to Raven’s taste—not enough to do, she said. I thought we might come here together one day. It’s very remote, I thought you might find it…peaceful.”

Erik glanced over his shoulder, eyebrow raised, and Charles shrugged with something like embarrassment. He was his current self now: too-long hair, clean-shaven, but standing. Even after all these years, Erik realized with a stab of guilt and pity, Charles walked in his dreams. 

“We’re on the French coast. You could see the dunes and the ocean from here if the storm wasn’t so severe. There’s an old lighthouse and a lift with one of those metal cage doors you pull shut, you know the kind?”

“I can feel it,” Erik said. Actually he’d felt it before he’d even registered the warmth from the fire. The metal in the elevator sang to his senses in that way common to all old, well-preserved mechanisms. “It goes below ground and up to the attic. It’s good metal, strong. The iron in the lighthouse too.”

“It’s an old hotel. Used to be the manor of some French aristocrat, I think.”

“That’s very educational I’m sure but what does this have to do with our…predicament?”

Erik saw the moment Charles went from uncertain of his welcome to firmly ensconced in professorial pedantry. It was a shift in body language, tone of voice, an overall brightening of his whole presence. “Well, not to sound too Freudian, but I think my subconscious has placed us here because it’s tired of pushing you away. Some part of me must want to talk to you after all, so we have comfortable surroundings, positive associations, a place I’d thought of us coming together—quite obvious, really. And that—” he pointed to the snowstorm outside “—would seem to indicate that, surface tranquility aside, my mind isn’t entirely at ease.”

“Because you’ve…” Erik trailed off deliberately, making a gesture that invited Charles to complete the sentence himself.

“Look, I’d like to make it very clear that my intentions were benign, arguably even noble, and I certainly didn’t mean to drag you into this whole mess—”

“ _Charles_.” 

Sorely tempted as he was to take Charles by the shoulders and shake him until the answers flew free, Erik had to consider the possibility that he was right, that Charles’s subconscious mind was in control and would almost certainly interpret violence on his part as good reason for another escape attempt. Considering their personal histories, there were far less pleasant places they could end up next. He took several calming breaths, looked around, and nearly laughed out loud with relief when he spotted a service trolley with crystal tumblers and a full decanter of amber liquid. If this conversation was doomed to be circuitous, at least it would also be well-lubricated. He poured them both glasses and sat down on the leather sofa; Charles did the same, more distractedly.

“I sealed it off,” he said finally, abruptly. “You shouldn’t be here because I built my shields up as high as they’ve ever been so I couldn’t do what I did again, to you or anyone else. What if it was one of the children next? So I sealed it off. It should be entirely confined to my own head. Yet here you are.”

There was a moment of silence. Then Erik made a sound that might have been a laugh or something far sadder. He raised his glass and echoed, “Here I am.” 

It made sense now: the clipped speech, the lack of depth perception, the way Charles had clung to him like his body was the only real thing in the world. Erik knew what it was like to have his mutation taken away. The disorientation was staggering. He’d felt vertigo, the bizarre conviction that he was looking at the world through dirty glass, a complete inability to orient himself in space; he’d fallen over repeatedly until his brain learned to compensate. Losing any of the other five senses would have been easier. He couldn’t imagine what it had felt like for Charles to do that to himself, or how frightened he must have been for it to seem like a good idea in the first place. His eyes burned the way they did before tears came and he rubbed his hand across them quickly and took another drink.

“I think it’s fairly clear it didn’t work,” Charles said. He was staring into the fire, slumped and dejected. “The shields didn’t stay up in my sleep. Or perhaps I built them wrong, or my telepathy has changed somehow in the aftermath of…everything. I could talk to Hank about a variation on the serum, I could—”

Erik wanted to throw his drink against the wall. He set it down on the table instead, hard enough that the crack of glass on glass made Charles flinch. 

“You’ll do none of those things,” he snapped. “Charles, believe me, I’ve been there—you’re going to drive yourself madder than you already are. We’ll talk to Raven, we’ll talk to Hank, we’ll talk to each other but you cannot declare your powers a danger to all of us and make unilateral decisions about them at the same time, do you understand?”

“Last time I checked it was my mutation, Erik,” Charles said stiffly. His anger was an icy politeness.

“It is! It’s your strength, it’s a gift, and you can’t lock it away and hope it never bothers you again because it’s always been a part of you and always will. A beautiful part, Charles.” 

“Yes, yes, mutant and proud,” Charles said mockingly. “Are you so devoted to your stump speech that you’ll just ignore the fact that my _gift_ nearly did you irreparable harm last night?”

Erik refused to dignify that with a response, shot back, “Are you so determined to be the headmaster of a school for mutants when you openly loathe and repress your own mutation? What kind of example does that set for your students?”

Charles looked ready to shout back, his color high and his shoulders tense, but he deflated just as quickly. Sullenly he mumbled, “I know you called her.”

Erik stared at him, confused. “What?”

“Raven, I know you called Raven. In the study tonight.”

If he’d still been holding his glass Erik would have dropped it. A gust of panic cold as the wind outside swept through him as he combed through his memories of that conversation, trying to recall if he’d said anything explicit about Charles’s subconscious use of his telepathy. He suspected if he had Charles would have led with that but it had been hours ago, he’d been so tired and overwrought and Raven had sounded so reassuring and capable. He might have said anything in his need to convince her of the severity of their situation. But Charles couldn’t know, not when he was set in his belief that his powers were stronger than he was and the only thing his telepathy was capable of was inflicting damage on people he loved. One unfortunate incident and he’d tried to seal it away permanently—Erik couldn’t imagine what he would do if he found out he’d been unconsciously manipulating them all this time, even if no harm had been done. The same dizziness overtook him that he’d felt in that Florida motel room and he thought again _This is happening too quickly, time, time, I just need more time_.

But Charles seemed oblivious to Erik’s inner turmoil. He leaned forward, earnest and apologetic. “You went to Raven because you don’t know what to do with me but I can do more, Erik, I can do better.” 

“That’s why you did this?” Erik said, disbelieving. “You tried to cut off your own mutation because I was mildly shaken and turned to your sister, the only other person on the planet I care for even slightly besides you?”

“Yes!” Charles burst out. Then he paused, frowned, visibly retraced his line of logic. “Well, no. That would be very childish.”

“Yes, it would.”

“I did nearly rewrite every thought in your head because an unhinged but possibly not terribly exaggerated projection of my worst self thought it would make you happier,” Charles pointed out. “That was also a motivating factor.”

“And I told you, you didn’t, and it’s over.”

Charles sighed but he didn’t disagree this time and he didn’t try to tell Erik how to feel either. There was even a hint of a smile on his face though his eyes were tired now. They had come full circle and both knew it. Charles relaxed back against the couch like his strings had been cut, a marionette who could finally rest, and as he did Erik felt his own inner shudder of relief; they had survived this, he had survived this. Soon Raven would come and they would find a solution together, would ensure that Charles never had occasion to do something so foolhardy and dangerous to himself again. They wouldn’t let him.

“The storm is ending,” Charles said quietly. “Can you see the ocean?”

Erik stood up and went to the window again. The wind had calmed. The snow blew in eddies and not straight lines that would cut bare skin like knives, and between the eddies he thought he could see a pale beach littered with dark rocks. “Not yet.”

“Can we stay here awhile longer?”

“As long as you like,” Erik said. “It’s peaceful here.”

When he opened his eyes again it was morning, and Raven was in the kitchen burning the toast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Homeslices, I have missed you all. Sorry this took so long--family was visiting, I was sick, etc. 
> 
> Muchas gracias to garnettrees for the help brainstorming. We are rockin' coparents raising some seriously weird kids.


	18. Charles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raven's back! Erik's an asshole! Charles is conflicted!

“Oh look, kids, Mr. Magneto’s here to make you breakfast,” Raven sang out cheerfully as they came into the kitchen. Three little heads swiveled in such perfect synchronicity that Charles briefly flashed back to those terrible horror movies Sean had loved, which seemed to over-rely on a preponderance of creepy children. The metal in his wheelchair flinched in sympathy as Erik came to an abrupt stop, uncomfortable at suddenly being the center of attention. Fortunately for him the attention spans in question were perilously short.

“Professor, Mystique burned _so much_ toast,” Scott said with a giggle, like she had been doing it for their amusement and not out of genuine culinary incompetence. 

“Yes, she did,” Raven agreed shamelessly as she tipped a full plate of blackened slices into the trash. “Almost had it at the end there, but there’s still some bread left. You want French toast, kids? Or pancakes? Omelets?”

The consensus seemed to be the second option, with Ororo pushing for the addition of chocolate chips. Jean confirmed very seriously that they had maple syrup before agreeing and Scott, who would eat anything, seemed mainly concerned with how long each would take to arrive on the table.

“You heard ‘em. Make the little monsters pancakes,” Raven said to Erik, after she’d given him a hearty clap on the shoulder and Charles a kiss on the cheek in greeting. 

Her smile had teeth and a teasing quality that edged toward mockery, not enough to tip off the children that there was tension between the grownups but certainly enough for Erik to get the message. Their new normal was still in flux. Barring catastrophes like the kind that had brought them together, she seemed to tolerate him on a trial basis that left very little room for error. It wasn’t punishment for Paris, or at least not all of it was; more her way of reminding him that the balance of power had shifted. The give and take between them of ten years ago had been reversed and Raven had no desire to go back to following orders. She had come to the mansion when he’d asked her to but by immediately throwing him under the bus in front of the kids made clear that compliance didn’t mean deference. Charles would have called this new vindictive streak of hers passive-aggression if it hadn’t been entirely unapologetic and, in his opinion, completely justified. 

Erik was no more annoyed by it than he was by anything these days. He gave her a similar pat on the shoulder and began assembling ingredients by the stove with silent efficiency. While Raven hopped up on the counter to drink her coffee, Charles wheeled over to the kettle, found it still hot, and made himself a cup of tea. No one mentioned why she had come back and she didn’t look at him like he scared her, which Charles appreciated so much he barely restrained himself from breaking the illusion of normalcy by hugging her. The silence could have been awkward if it had settled but instead the air was filled with the babble of the students as they all tried to be the first to tell their professor how Mystique had shown up in the middle of their Saturday morning cartoons.

There was a moment when the three of them in the kitchen with children at the table felt overwhelmingly surreal. It could have been 1962. Erik had done most of the cooking then too, and Raven had preferred to sit on that countertop since she could reach it. But in 1962 she would have been blonde and fake and Erik would have been wound tight with a ferocity he was missing now and Charles would have been standing next to them, instead of sitting in a wheelchair. He sighed and the déjà vu passed. They were all older, even Raven who looked younger, and the children at the tables weren’t their first class. Nothing was the same. 

Raven seemed to sense his thoughts better than he sensed hers, these days. Quietly, while the children continued to babble at Erik, she leaned over and whispered, “It feels strange, doesn’t it? Just like the good old days.”

The words were cheerful but there was something sardonic, even hurt, underneath them. Charles had said the wrong thing often enough to know the right thing now.

“For me, perhaps. I had everything I ever wanted and in light of what came after there has been a certain tendency to look on that period with…rose-colored glasses, shall we say.” In her natural form Raven’s body language was impossible to hide, and he could see her discomfort and the beginnings of disdain. “But you were hiding your true self, Hank was consumed with self-hatred, Erik was essentially preparing to commit suicide, I was of no help to any of you—it was hardly the best of times. At least, I should hope we can do better.”

Raven relaxed, smiled a little sadly. “Oh, Charles. You can be such an ass, but sometimes you’re really pretty sweet. You mean well, don’t you?”

“Always.” Though it didn’t absolve him of anything and both knew it.

“I hope we can do better too,” Raven said. The striations of meaning there were too complex to pick up this early in the morning and without his telepathy so Charles simply nodded and dared to squeeze her hand. For a few precious seconds, she let him.

The moment fractured when heavy footsteps thundered down the staircase, a prelude to Alex slouching into the kitchen in pajama bottoms and nothing else with his hair sticking up at every possible angle. 

“Cool, pancakes,” he said in the middle of a yawn that distorted the words completely. “Hey, Mystique, you’re back.”

Raven laughed and gestured at his disheveled appearance. Alex had let his hair grow after leaving the military; it was far past regulation and edging into hippie territory now, and his pajamas had belonged to a former student who was twice his size. “You kidding? Eye candy like this waiting for me, how could I stay away?”

Because he was the only one looking, Charles was the only one who saw Erik’s shoulders twitch with poorly-concealed amusement; the eye-roll he had to imagine since Erik’s back was to him, but Charles was certain it occurred. Alex ruffled Scott’s hair on his way to the coffee pot, eyes still only half-open, moving slow enough that Raven had a cup waiting for him by the time he crossed the kitchen. They were at ease with each other in a way Charles hadn’t envisioned. The first time Raven had visited after Alex’s discharge he had expected fireworks, but they seemed to have come to a truce without any help. Alex had greeted her in the foyer with a real smile and brief hug; their whispered conversation, which Charles had eavesdropped on unabashedly, had contained names Charles recognized as members of Alex’s old platoon. They didn’t talk much, weren’t precisely friends, but there was respect and understanding between them. They drank together in the evenings, watched the same late-night variety shows, helped each other train in the gym and Danger Room.

“Your sister did me and my unit a solid in Vietnam,” was all Alex would say about it.

Raven wasn’t much more forthcoming. One night she said, “Alex gets it. He’s a soldier like me. He fought the wrong war at the wrong time once, he won’t do it again.” 

All the resentment Alex wasn’t directing at Raven now went to Erik instead, which hadn’t exactly made the past few weeks any easier and certainly negated any hope of all of them eating breakfast together now. The only times Erik stayed for meals when Alex and Hank were present were when he was in a particularly good or particularly awful mood, both of which manifested in the desire to be more of an asshole than usual. Today Erik was thoughtful, withdrawn. He hadn’t said a word about their lucid dream or Charles’s attempt to cut off his telepathy completely, but Charles had opened his eyes that morning to find himself being watched unblinkingly and Erik had reached for his hand and pressed a kiss against his knuckles before leaving for his morning run. Something in his shoulders had relaxed when he’d seen Raven in the kitchen even though he’d yet to say a word to her. 

In fact he barely said a word to anyone beyond enlisting the children to help put drinks and toppings and utensils on the table again. While Alex and Raven traded small talk about the kids, the house, Hank’s continued habit of falling asleep in the lab, Erik mixed the batter and flipped the pancakes before dividing them evenly onto six plates and levitating four to the table. The other two he held out to Charles and Raven.

“Let’s eat outside,” he said, pouring coffee for himself. Charles’s mug bobbed away from his lips just as he was about to take a sip of tea and he regretted—not for the first time—allowing Erik to wrap paper clips around all the cutlery. Similar hostage situations had occurred before. 

“Sir yes sir,” Raven muttered under her breath as they followed him out to the veranda. The sun was only just above the treeline and the air was already warm. It would be a hot day. The children would spend the morning shrieking and running about the grounds and the afternoon flopped on couches in front of the television. Ororo might take it into her head to create a breeze, though her control was improving and she hadn’t used her powers subconsciously in at least a week. Erik put Charles’s tea down on the table and they sat in their usual way.

“You don’t look surprised to see me, brother dearest,” Raven said. “Did he tell you?”

Charles blushed and took a fortifying bite of breakfast while Erik, predictably, left him to twist in the wind. “Erm, not exactly. I happened to be nearby and…overheard part of the call. Accidentally.”

“Tell her what else you got up to last night, after that,” Erik said helpfully. 

“Do I want to know?” Raven asked, at the same time that Charles blurted, “I really don’t think that’s relevant.”

“He tried to cut off his telepathy entirely,” Erik said, entirely unfazed by Charles’s most forbidding glare.

“Fuck you too, my friend,” Charles said. “Bring your foot a little closer, I’d like to run over it.”

“Just making sure we’re all on the same page,” Erik said mildly, though his tone was undercut by the grin that showed every one of his teeth and made it clear that for all his apparent tranquility that morning he still had—well, opinions would be putting it mildly—about the past few nights. 

“He’s being overly dramatic,” Charles told Raven.

“I’m really not.”

“Jesus, what are you two, twelve?” Raven snapped. “I leave you alone for a week, I’m surprised you haven’t burned the place down yet.”

Hers was that anger that masked fear. It burned bright and quick because there was no real heat to it. Even without telepathy, Charles still had empathy; he could imagine her confusion, the alarm when Erik had demanded that she come back at once, when every report she’d heard until then had emphasized how well he was doing. To come back unsure of what kind of catastrophe she was walking into and find everything as it was—normal for their given definition of it—of course she was uncertain, and her uncertainty manifested as frustration. He felt chastened. He looked at Erik and saw that blankness on his face that indicated a similar thought process.

“I’m sorry, darling,” he said. “It’s been a busy few days, we’re all—overexcited.”

Raven nodded. “So tell me what’s going on.”

There were no words for some of it, but Charles tried. Raven didn’t know about the flashback so he began there, two nights ago when they’d played chess in the library. It was the first time that he spoke of the killing as something he had done and not simply something he remembered. Memory put a shield between him and his actions, made them distant and dreamlike. He couldn’t succumb to the temptation to think of that Charles as anyone but himself, he had to deal in reality, come at it like a scientist. Quantifying the trauma helped in a strange way—the PCP had triggered chemical, physiological side effects that manifested as rage and euphoria exactly as the General had said they would. He described them: the break that had occurred when that other mind subsumed him, how his shields had failed. He said nothing about canaries or how taking that man’s body for his own had felt more natural than breathing at that point, with the damage to his ribs. Deliberately avoiding moral implications, he said nothing about how right it had felt, only that it had been easy. Raven’s eyes went to Erik then.

“And then?” she said.

Charles looked to Erik too. He was on shakier ground now. “There are gaps after that. Shock of some kind. Erik got me to Hank but at some point I lost control of my telepathy and created a projection of myself that threatened him.”

“So far as threats go I’ve had worse than the threat of eternal happiness,” Erik said. Seeing Raven’s confusion, he explained, “Charles—the projection of Charles—seemed to think that imprisonment had affected my mental state. He offered to finish what the humans started. Wipe the slate clean, as it were.”

“Total annihilation,” Raven translated. She turned to Charles, in awe. “Could you have done it? Wiped not just his memory but his whole personality? Could you have changed him like that, permanently?”

Charles didn’t like the question and he liked the answer even less. Raven and Erik were the two people in the world most likely to catch him in a lie and the two he felt guiltiest for lying to, and that left no recourse but the uncomfortable truth. “Obviously I’ve never tested it but…yes. Well, sort of. If I was projecting myself as well, I could but not without causing great damage. He would be a true blank slate. Nothing left. If I wasn’t expending focus on a projection, with my full power, I could do a great deal more. So long as it was there to begin with—an emotion, a thought, an inclination—I could suppress or enhance it however much I wanted to.”

“Would he know?”

Charles shook his head silently.

“Would you?” Erik asked. There was something strange and speculative about him now, a thought process unwinding beneath his carefully blank expression. 

Charles kept his silence out of that old pagan conviction that speaking something made it real. If he didn’t admit the truth it didn’t exist; the logic was simple. Erik had his answer in that silence. 

“You wouldn’t. If it happened again, a break or loss of control like that, you could take away everything I am and neither of us would ever know.”

Charles couldn’t bear to look at either of them. That Erik sounded somewhere between rueful and impressed was no comfort—he had always appreciated mutations at their most dangerous and his fascination with telepathy in particular was both morbid and masochistic in ways Charles felt unprepared to think about too closely just now. Raven’s silence was ominous too. Charles wondered if he had frightened her, if her silence hid churning thoughts of escape. He tried to defend himself. “Which is exactly why I raised my shields last night, and why I still think I should try again.”

“Don’t try to make it sound reasonable,” Erik snapped. “You tried to cut off your mutation. You could have done yourself irreparable damage.”

“Name my other choices, please,” Charles said with forced calm. 

“You already did,” Erik said. “Do you remember? Before you gave serious thought to a non-consensual telepathic lobotomy, you made another offer.”

That need to devour, a hunger to be sated at any price—he felt it again in flashes, not a memory he would have trusted without Erik’s confirmation. Some were like that, memories indistinguishable from dreams. Last night, the night before, his weeks of captivity; they were clearer but clearer wasn’t clarity. He tried to go back, before that image of Erik pressed against the wall. He saw Erik standing tall and proud but wavering, his jaw clenched in that way that meant he was holding back tears. To hear the precise words he’d dreamed of in all his wildest fantasies…for Charles to ask the questions Erik had asked himself a thousand times over…even if the projection had given him a chance to respond, Erik wouldn’t have known what to say. 

_I’m simply saying genocide would give me an awful headache, darling._

There was ice in Charles’s veins, frozen fingers squeezing his heart. An entire day Erik had spent thinking about this and Charles knew how his mind worked, he knew how obsessively Erik could fixate on a single idea.

“Erik, no,” Charles said. 

Erik knelt beside the wheelchair, open and earnest, unstoppable. “You said you could give me hope, that we could achieve safety for all mutants, the compliance of the humans, and that we could do it together. You said your pro-human agenda was nonsense and nothing needed to happen that we didn’t want to. You changed your mind.”

“I didn’t,” Charles protested weakly.

“You did,” Raven said. It was half a question, half a rebuke. She didn’t know what they were talking about, but she knew when he was lying. He looked to her for help and found none; her surprise was overpowering, her eyes flicking between him and Erik as if unsure who to believe.

“I wasn’t myself,” he tried instead. “The projection said things I never would—I’d never change your mind without your consent, Erik, you know that, and I’d never turn my back on—”

“That’s not the point,” Erik interrupted. He was still on his knees, still gripping Charles’s hand between both of his own like he could tether them together in this moment for as long as it took to make Charles understand. “I already told you, it doesn’t matter what you could have done. You didn’t. But don’t you see, Charles? It goes both ways. You couldn’t manipulate a thought or feeling that wasn’t already present in me on some level and your projection, whatever its origin, wouldn’t have made an offer it didn’t have the power and desire to see through. That means that there is a part of you that thinks I’m right. You agree that we would be better off without the humans.”

Erik at his most evangelical was equal parts mesmerizing and unbearable. Charles wasn’t sure which he hated more, the overbearing certainty in Erik or the whisper of uncertainty in himself, the slightest sigh of suspicion that Erik was right. After Cuba, after Washington, after what they’d done to Erik in prison and to him in the lab, what rational person would believe peaceful co-existence was possible? He could end the war before it began, make the world safe for his students. Didn’t he owe them that? No deaths, no bloodshed, just the slightest increase or decrease in beliefs that already existed in the hearts of world leaders and people in positions of power. Persecution of mutants and Erik’s crusade, both halted at once. He remembered again how easily he’d taken over the Nazi’s mind and body, wondered how changing a few dozen minds would compare. He imagined pressing down the keys on a well-loved piano, how the lightest touch in the right places at the right times produced a beautiful symphony. 

“Charles,” Erik said gently. Charles felt tears on his face and tremors in his fingers and Erik was looking at him like he was the most fragile, perfect thing in the world, and Charles hated him more in that moment than he had in years.

“You’re wrong,” he hissed, pulling away. “You’re wrong about this and you’re wrong that we’d be better off without the humans. Just drop it, leave it, please—”

Erik became conciliatory quickly, sensing that he’d cornered something reckless and dangerous. “I’m not asking you to join the Brotherhood, Charles. I’m not asking you to _do_ anything. Just think about what it is you really want, even if it’s more comfortable to pretend you don’t. Be honest about how far you’re willing to go for our people. Nothing that projection said was a lie, was it?”

Charles ignored the question. He wasn’t sure he could stomach the answer. “If you’ll recall, the last time people wanted me to help them using my telepathy it went rather catastrophically so appealing to my status as a mutant whose powers can be weaponized is not the smartest _or_ safest route.”

“Charles, that’s not fair,” Raven said, voice soft with rebuke. 

At the same time Erik jerked back like Charles’s nearness suddenly caused him pain. “That’s not what I meant. You know that’s not what I meant.”

“Then what _did_ you mean?”

“I simply asked you to consider that we might not have to wait fifty years to work together if you would only admit that there is a part of you that believes as I do. Is that really so difficult?”

Once Erik would have flown into a rage by now; instead he sounded bewildered. Charles wondered if that was what he was hoping for, if he was deliberately goading Erik into anger because it was more familiar and more bearable than this gentle attempt at persuasion with its undertones of hope and longing. It was such a simple thing Erik was asking for, on the surface. Such a small concession to make. The trouble was that Erik had never been satisfied with one small concession. He dealt in totalities and if Charles gave ground here he would keep giving it and Erik would keep pushing, asking more and more of him, until he asked for something unforgiveable. He wanted Charles at his side or entirely out of the way, no half-measures, no toothless alliances. Charles knew suddenly that he was on the verge of a moment of weakness with irrevocable results and if he stayed here much longer Erik’s pleas would win him over. He would make that first concession willingly. A frisson of fear ran through him at the thought.

“I need to talk to Hank,” Charles said, after clearing his throat to make sure his voice was steady. “If you’ll excuse me—”

Erik clenched his fists where they rested on his thighs and his eyes flashed but he said nothing. It was Raven who stopped him.

“We’re not done here. All this unfinished business aside,” she said, gesturing between the two of them, “there is still the matter of regaining a measure of control over your telepathy. At the very least enough control so that you can practice using it without worrying about knocking out everyone in a five-mile radius. I think I know someone who can help.”

“Another mutant?” Erik guessed.

“No one you haven’t met before,” Raven said. Her smile was genuine, her happiness jarring against the tension that still hung over them. “The Brotherhood got new intel recently, tangentially related to the reason I had to run the other week, about a black ops site in Nevada running experiments on mutants. Including a telepath with a secondary mutation that turns her body into diamond. Sound like anyone we know?”

“Emma fucking Frost,” Erik said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry, there's not another 10-chapter rescue coming up, I already put you through that :)


	19. Erik (1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Erik finds the silver lining in his near death experience, is hella delusional

It was a shameful truth that Erik had never liked Emma. By turns he’d respected her, worried about her, loathed her, feared her, cared for her in that abstract way he’d cared for everyone in the Brotherhood, but he had never been able to look at her without seeing the absence of Charles. He’d never forgiven her for being herself and not someone else.

They had spoken of it once. She’d found him on the balcony of their current safehouse, a mansion that had belonged to one of Shaw’s old cronies until Erik had slit his throat two days before. It was early enough in the life of the Brotherhood that Erik wore the helmet constantly but hadn’t yet become accustomed to the weight of it, the sweat that pooled and itched around the rim on the back of his neck, the partial deafness and impaired peripheral vision. 

“Oh, honey, you’re not special,” she’d told him. “You think you’re the first man to not give a damn about who I am, just what I can do? You don’t even crack the top twenty. Save your self-loathing for worthier causes.”

There had been no way to protest that his wasn’t the dislike of garden-variety misogynists without revealing that it was a deeply personal irrational grudge instead. 

“It would be a mistake to think you know what kind of man I am,” he had responded. Inadequate, but the closest he could come to the truth. 

The news of her death had earned him another prison transfer. He’d been in Colorado then, or maybe California. The guards were all young and fresh-faced, the worst kind of bigots for barely being bigots at all. It was standard operating procedure for a pair of them to deliver his meals, one to carry the tray and one to keep a plastic gun trained on him at all times even though this prison warden had been overly fond of lacing the food with tranquilizers. Erik spent most of his time struggling to stay awake and cursing his watery muscles. The cell wasn’t soundproof and during one of his rare moments of lucidity he had overheard one guard ask the other what they would do with “the body.”

“It’s not like they can do an autopsy or cremation, y’know?” The boy’s voice had barely changed, he was so young. He sounded earnestly curious. “But like, real diamonds—talk about being worth more dead than alive, man.”

Even half-conscious, Erik’s rage had been volcanic. His weakened metal-sense had spasmed and he had flung it outward, where it caught on the door at the other end of the long corridor. The door itself was fortified against him but one of the guards had left it cracked open, barely an inch but enough for Erik to feel the metal in the room on the other side. He had hooked his powers into every atom of it and pulled with all his strength; the hurricane of computers, chairs, tables, and filing cabinets that had crushed the two guards against the cell like insects on a car windshield had barely registered before he’d fallen unconscious again.

The warden after that had preferred electroshock.

“Erik,” a voice said. Sharp, impatient. Then again, “Erik!”

Erik blinked several times, shook his head as he was yanked back to the present. 

“With us?” Charles said. Raven looked alarmed but Charles was still too angry to be worried, cold and unsympathetic in that way he had when he was forced to leave an argument unfinished. Erik’s own irritation still hummed under his skin but his shock was louder. Once anger would have taken precedence over everything; now he was too easily overwhelmed by other emotions, forced to address them before he lost control. 

“They lied to me,” he said, wondering at his own surprise. 

“Or someone lied to them,” Raven said. “Seems obvious now. This goes deeper than the CIA—of course they’d spread it down the ladder that she was dead. No further questions, no more paper trail, officially she’s off the books, no one goes looking.”

“You couldn’t have known, darling,” Charles said. 

“I should have,” Raven said without guilt or self-pity—like it was an irrefutable fact. “But that doesn’t matter now. We move forward. I’m going to fill in Hank and you’re going to sort yourselves out enough to be useful and then find Alex and meet us in the lab. Okay?”

As soon as she went back into the house Erik leaned over and picked up her remaining pancake, folding it in two and eating half in one bite. He was suddenly ravenous.

“Your sister’s getting very bossy,” he said as he chewed.

“Better her in charge of strategy than either of us, at this point,” Charles sighed. He seemed about to say something else; instead he closed his mouth and watched Erik polish off the rest of Raven’s breakfast with the fascinated revulsion of an entomologist observing a mating ritual that concluded with one partner devouring the other. Erik wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and licked his fingers clean when he was done, which he knew Charles found particularly obnoxious. 

“You’re going to need to get over this one, Charles. I’m not going to apologize,” he said. 

Charles didn’t look especially surprised or disappointed. “You’re a complete wanker.”

“You knew that.” 

“And I’m in no danger of forgetting, so you really don’t need to keep reminding me.”

Erik cracked a wry smile. It wasn’t feigned. There was a part of him close to the surface that found arguing with Charles familiar, even comforting. Not the congenial bickering they’d engaged in since Charles first regained consciousness, about books or television programs or the children, but a real argument that threw the massive ideological divide between them into sharp relief and reminded Erik that cleaving together in a time of mutual trauma was not the same as learning to compromise. He had been forgetting that on his own, no telepathic influence needed. But there was no danger like complacency and as Charles healed, became more himself, their old disagreements grew more unavoidable. Before long Charles would realize that Erik, for all his current exhaustion and post-incarceration unsteadiness, had only cracked psychologically, not philosophically. Depending on whether that realization came consciously or unconsciously one of two things would happen: Charles would tell him to leave, that he was a danger to the school, or he would change Erik’s mind for him and odds were neither of them would ever know. Neither of those outcomes were acceptable.

The projection’s words had opened up a third possibility, however reluctant Charles was to acknowledge it. 

Understandably reluctant, Erik could admit now that the news about Emma had blunted the edges of his anger. Charles needed to be a good man—or at least be able to think of himself as one. He couldn’t bear the thought that there was darkness in him, that he was no different from the rest of them in that way. It sickened him that he could so easily be a danger not only to those he loved but to the whole world. Erik had watched him struggle to piece himself back together in the aftermath of torture all these weeks and seen also the moment when he was effortlessly overwhelmed by that part of his splintered psyche that he pretended didn’t exist. Erik had always worked in tandem with his dark side; Charles’s had seized control without his consent. The resulting self-loathing—there was a logic to it.

But unless Charles made him forget it Erik would always remember the projection’s honest confusion when he said they couldn’t work together, the ease with which it had overturned all his assumptions about Charles’s moral inflexibility. It had been a manipulative creature, but not a liar. Just as it had promised, it had given him hope. They could face the coming war together if only Charles would exhibit the same pragmatism consciously and understand that letting humankind fend for itself didn’t make him any less moral, any less perfect, any less himself.

“If there is a chance,” he said carefully, “any chance at all that we can ensure Logan’s future never comes to pass, we would be fools not to take it. The Sentinel project was decommissioned but you know Trask wasn’t the last of his kind. They won’t rest and neither can we. The men who took you, the men who took Emma—they must be stopped.”

“And that would be enough?” Charles said, unimpressed. “Look me in the eye, Erik, and tell me it would be enough to take down a few dozen scientists, demolish a few labs. Because I don’t think it would be, not for you.”

“It would be a start,” Erik said. This moment was too pivotal to lie. 

“And where would it end?”

“With a brave new world built out of whatever mutants and humans we please, just as you said.”

Charles sighed impatiently but he wouldn’t meet Erik’s eyes, which was several steps up from the unblinking glare of before. It meant he was thinking, no longer consumed with the kind of resentment that would make conversation impossible. 

Then he laughed, quiet and bitter. “It hardly matters now, does it? Once Raven completes what I’m sure will be another terrifyingly efficient rescue mission, you’ll have your own telepath back. One who you know already agrees with you. I’m hardly worth the trouble when you have someone who won’t fight you every step of the way.”

That wasn’t true—Emma had disagreed with him more frequently than Mystique, in the old days—but it didn’t seem the right time to point that out. 

Erik dared to lay his hand over Charles’s, then lace their fingers together when he didn’t pull away immediately. He had to play this carefully now, appear vulnerable but not uncertain. “It was always you I wanted, Charles. And I have no interest in remaking the Brotherhood as it was ten years ago. The world has changed, we’ve all changed. Mystique said we move forward—I say we do it together.”

“If you demand an answer from me now, my friend, you may not like the one you get,” Charles warned.

Erik nodded reluctant understanding. He looked away, gave Charles a moment to examine his own thoughts. The sun had risen well above the treeline now, encroaching visibly on the cool shadows of the verandah, and the students’ voices echoed high and loud from the mansion’s north face. A feeling like déjà vu swept over him, a familiar sense that time was running out. Even as he shied away from it he had found something close to peace here. Closer than he’d ever thought possible, in any case. The surface part of him that scorned Charles’s naiveté was undercut by a childish longing for stability, consistency. It shrieked in his undermind and sounded like himself during those first days/weeks/months of imprisonment, when he’d screamed until his voice had given out. Perhaps it was only subconscious telepathic manipulation that had made the last weeks seem so idyllic. Perhaps they really had been. There was no way to know and to that part of himself that had grown weak but just wouldn’t die it didn’t matter. His emotions stained him like blood, immutable even when they were no longer tangible, carried with him forever.

He wondered how long it could have lasted, if not for the news of Emma. 

“We may not have a later, Charles. It could be now or never.”

He saw the moment Charles wrapped the mantle of Professor X around his doubts. Stern and cool, he said, “The X-Men will aid the Brotherhood with Emma’s rescue in any way we can. If she needs time to convalesce, she’s welcome here. And if she’s able I would—appreciate the perspective of another telepath regarding my own condition, as Raven suggested. After the mission you and I will talk again.” His voice softened. “An honest talk, about what we really believe. No matter how uncomfortable those truths.”

“Thank you,” Erik said. “I’ve never lied to you, Charles. I don’t intend to start now. All I ask is that you return the favor.”

Before Charles could respond there was the patter of bare feet running across hardwood floors from inside the mansion; they both turned just in time to see Ororo skid to a stop by catching her tiny body against the doorframe. She was panting and wide-eyed with curiosity and kept glancing back over her shoulder, too breathless at first to speak.

“Professor?”

“Yes, darling, what is it?” Charles said patiently.

“There’s a lady here? She says she’s an old friend of Mr. Magneto? I don’t think she feels good.” She lowered her voice a little like she was sharing a secret. “She’s really pretty, like a princess.”

Erik didn’t even have time to glance to the side and see if there was consternation on Charles’s face to mirror his own. A very pale, very slender hand curled over Ororo’s shoulder and Emma Frost stepped out of the darkness of the mansion and into the sunlight, almost imperceptibly leaning on the child for balance and still white as the ghost Erik had assumed she was until an hour ago. It was the pallor of sun deprivation and malnutrition and her ivory go-go boots and mini-dresses had been replaced by a white prison jumpsuit underneath a white denim jacket several sizes too big. Even in her human form something about her had always sparkled; she seemed duller now. Erik half-expected light to pass through her instead of reflect off her. 

She managed a strained smile. “As fun as it is to watch you boys gaping like fish out of water and much as I’d like to catch up in a leisurely fashion, this princess has some bad news. Your kingdom’s under attack.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the shorter chapter--more has to happen from Erik's POV and to do it all in one chapter would have been too busy. Plot things are the _worst_ , amirite?


	20. Erik (2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emma, fault lines

They went down to the lab together. Emma set the pace with every bit of her old imperiousness, sure in her steps though they came not with the click of high heels but the thunk of heavy-duty work boots stolen somewhere between Nevada and New York. But that pace was slow and Erik didn’t miss that she had one hand clenched on the back of Charles’s wheelchair. She had refused to answer any questions until the others were present, saying she was too tired to tell the same story three times over and they hadn’t the time for such redundancy in any case. 

“Including laser boy babysitting out back,” she added. “Your students are safer inside anyway. For now, at least. Go get him and meet us downstairs.”

“Can’t you just ask him—” Erik began, gesturing at his temple the way he had picked up from Charles to imply the use of telepathy. He had forgotten that Emma’s glares justified her surname as much as her secondary mutation. Even weakened as she was now, when her blue eyes narrowed and glinted like shards of ice he figured the sentence best left unfinished.

“Telepathically I’m a little burned out at present,” she said. “It took the ‘help’ of a few dozen security guards, soldiers, truck drivers, flight attendants, and random strangers to get me across the country and I’m not about to spend the ashes I’ve got left on a message you could probably send yourself if you shouted loud enough.” When he remained stubbornly rooted in place she sighed, softened a little. “It’s safe to leave your boyfriend alone with me for five seconds—I couldn’t hurt him if I wanted to.”

“Go, darling,” Charles said gently, squeezing his hand and looking up at him with that entirely trusting expression that made Erik want to wrap him in blankets and hide the both of them away behind metal walls in some far corner of the world. Now that it was too late that wanting filled him more than ever. Erik had never allowed himself much hope for the future; when he had pictured it on his most optimistic days since Charles’s rescue, his best-case scenario was a seamless continuation of the present. He knew their equilibrium was unsustainable. He knew there was something monstrous about wishing for Charles’s recovery to take even longer, to postpone the moment when he wasn’t needed anymore. He knew Charles was bewitching them all in this strange liminal place set aside from the horrors of the real world sure as any creature out of teutonic legend—and not only knew it but accepted it, even embraced it as had once been his worst fear. On mornings when he woke with Charles in his arms it sometimes took him entire minutes to remember why he had been afraid, why this was wrong, why it could never last. 

Emma’s arrival upset the equilibrium. She was reality intruding upon them, with her powers crippled from overuse and the signs of her captivity clear in the new lines on her face, her weight loss, her blonde hair lank and heavy with grease. He’d never seen her nails unmanicured before.

“Don’t worry, sugar, I’m sure we’ll find _something_ to talk about while you’re gone,” she said with a shadow of her old sneer.

“Fine. Wait for us here,” he said. Exerting some small amount of control over the situation was like dangling over a cliff by a single finger, but it was better than nothing.

He left them in the hallway and walked as quickly as he could without running through the mansion and then out the back entrance onto the grounds. Ororo had rejoined Jean and Scott and the three of them barreled around the yard in an increasingly-violent game of tag. She’d apparently said nothing of their new visitor to Alex, who would surely have curtailed playtime already instead of remaining sprawled in the shade with one eye on the kids and the other on a comic book from the collection he’d inherited from Sean. He looked up as Erik came closer, then threw the comic book aside and crossed his arms over his chest.

“What d’you want, Magneto?”

“Get them inside and come with me,” Erik said, careful not to be overheard. When Alex’s jaw began to set stubbornly, he neatly sidestepped an argument about authority: “Professor’s orders.”

The boy Erik had helped train in 1962 would have argued anyway; since then Alex had learned to assess a threat before he attacked it. He analyzed tone and body language instinctively, sized up every stranger as a possible enemy, had the heightened caution of a soldier accustomed to surprise attacks. When he sulked there was something performative about it now. His distrust for Erik was as open and honest as his devotion to the school was total. Hearing that the command came from Charles and seeing the cracks in Erik’s usual stoicism was enough for him to get the measure of the situation and then he moved quickly, calling to the children in a voice that was calm but brooked no argument. His easy amble as they followed the kids back to the house didn’t match the sharpness in the gaze he turned on Erik. It fell on him like a floodlight, impossible to escape or ignore.

“We’ve received an unexpected visit from an unexpectedly alive Emma Frost,” Erik said in answer to the unasked question. “She escaped a facility in Nevada. Apparently we’re to expect visitors of a distinctly more threatening kind as well.”

Alex processed that with rather more aplomb than Erik had expected. Then, suspiciously: “Is she here to warn us about them or lead them to us?” 

“Settle your students quickly and ask her yourself. She and Charles are waiting for us.”

“Why the hell would you leave her alone with Charles?” Alex hissed. His calm exterior slipped for a moment, revealing someone younger and more anxious—a ghost of the boy who had languished, angry and forgotten by the world, in a prison cell until Charles Xavier had appeared from nowhere and given all the things society had denied him—a second chance, forgiveness, happiness, a family—like they weren’t rare and precious gifts. Alex had nothing to give back except his loyalty and protection and they had been Charles’s from the beginning. Threats to Charles could now be met by a grown man with the skill-set of a professional soldier and a perfectly-controlled mutation, but they registered first with the frightened boy he had been. 

Too anxious to wait for an answer, Alex herded the children into the sitting room and switched on the TV to NBC, promised them ice cream later if they watched _The Hollywood Squares_ and _Jeopardy_ in perfect silence for the next hour. Erik tired of waiting after five seconds and went back to the hallway where he’d left Emma and Charles.

It wasn’t really a surprise to find them gone. Charles never stayed put; the moment Erik left him to his own devices for ten seconds he decided he desperately needed a cup of tea or an obscure scientific journal or to check on the children. Erik had lost track of him enough times in recent weeks that the instinctive panic response had devolved to fond frustration but the presence of Emma Frost changed everything. He flung out his powers and found the wheelchair downstairs, the metal still body-warm and unchanged in any way.

“Come on,” he threw over his shoulder to Alex, who had finally caught up. “They’re in the lab. Probably making stupid decisions as we speak.”

For once he was glad to be wrong. No strategy session was yet in progress. Charles and Hank were on one side of the room and Raven and Emma were on the other. Their red and blonde heads were tipped close together and Raven had her blue hands fisted in the lapels of the white denim jacket like she expected Emma to be physically torn away from her again. There was something close to an actual emotion on Emma’s face—the hint of a smile and a brightness in her eyes that was all too human to be diamond.

“I’m sorry, Em,” he overheard Raven saying in a hoarse whisper. “I should have come for you sooner, I shouldn’t have believed the reports—”

Erik hadn’t been aware it was possible to sympathetically roll one’s eyes, but Emma managed it. “It’s not your fault, honey. This outfit was so deep underground only a handful of people in Washington even knew it existed. If it’s anyone’s fault it’s mine, for making it nearly impossible to find me.”

“What does that mean, it’s your fault?”

Alex’s voice cut across the room, echoing too loudly off the metal walls and sharp with hostility. With Erik distracted by the sight of his old second-in-command embracing a former ally he’d long thought dead, Alex had beaten him to Charles’s side this time and anchored himself there, glaring protectively. Alex on one side, Hank on the other—Charles flanked by his own lieutenants. Emma and Raven stood together, no doubts there. How easily the lines had been drawn once reality intruded on them once again…

Only Erik seemed unsure of his place. Halfway between the two he backed away from both instead, leaning against the wall and feigning nonchalance, stone-faced, with his hands in his pockets to hide their shaking.

“Don’t be an asshole, Alex,” Raven snapped.

“It’s okay. I promised them some answers,” Emma said in a soothing undertone. Her eyes swept the room; she became brisk, businesslike, speaking to all of them now. “I found a…loophole, you could call it, in their defenses against me. They kept me in a cell lined with some material that my telepathy couldn’t penetrate, but it was only partly effective when the door opened. My powers weakened over time so I couldn’t convince them to let me go but I could make them forget what they were doing there. A kind of invisibility. Guards brought meals and walked away not knowing how they got to that part of the facility. Again and again, every day. Didn’t get much sleep—couldn’t miss a visitor, see—but it worked. I became a completely unnoticed cog in their machine.”

“And the unit was so secretive and self-contained that no higher-ups ever came looking for results or information about you,” Raven said, understanding how such facilities worked better than any of them. 

“No rescue teams, either,” Emma said. “And that was that, until a few days ago.”

Erik felt there should have been a pause then. Some moment of silent commiseration for Emma’s ordeal. Loyalties aside, surely they could at least agree that no mutant should be forced to choose between years of invisibility or years of torture. Erik had been imprisoned for longer, experimented upon, treated like he was less than human instead of more than, but at least he’d had some interaction with his captors. Sometimes it was only juxtaposed against them that he retained any sense of self at all: he hadn’t always known who he was but he’d never forgotten who he wasn’t. The only thing he could think of that was worse than being watched all the time was never being seen at all. Emma hadn’t been cut off from her mutation and he envied her that, but she’d been unable to fight back, forced into a kind of non-being that was its own kind of torture. It would have been inhumane if it wasn’t so predictably human. 

He and Charles met each other’s eyes across the room, and Erik could see the same thought process unfold in him as well. There was a flash of sympathy across his face and then that biting of the lower lip that meant Charles had come to a conclusion he didn’t like but couldn’t refute. Erik knew what it was because he’d done the same—whatever sympathy Emma deserved, they hadn’t time to give it to her. They had press on and if they got lucky—very lucky, Erik intuited—there would be a moment of quiet to give her the credit she was due. 

But it couldn’t be now.

“What upset the status quo?” Charles asked.

“I’m guessing you did, sugar,” Emma said. “They weren’t very chatty, the people who took me. Maybe it was the same group that snatched you up, maybe all telepath-kidnapping black ops units have a newsletter or a crisis hotline. All I know for sure is that last week the guards stopped coming. No visitors at all for a day or two. Then, right before I died of boredom, this new outfit bursts in, at least a dozen of them. It was more than I could handle at once. I couldn’t make them forget and even if I could have it was obvious someone higher up now had a vested interested in me.” She paused, the kind of silence that felt like another person in the room, and her eyes went to Charles. “Military, I think. They mentioned a general.”

No one missed Charles’s slight flinch or reacted to it. His voice was perfectly steady when he said, “Was he there?” 

Emma shrugged. “If he was I didn’t see him. But I didn’t exactly stick around to ask.”

“How’d you make it out, if you couldn’t make them forget?” Raven asked.

“Calculated risk. Poorly calculated, I’ll admit,” Emma said. “I’m bullet-proof when I want to be and even though I couldn’t make them forget I existed I could make myself invisible long enough to get out the door. I hoped that for once bureaucratic ineptitude would be good for something and I was right. No one seemed to know who was in charge, security protocols were shot, there were too many guns and not enough helmets. By the time they initiated lockdown and organized search parties to find me I was on my way off-base in the back of an empty convoy vehicle.”

Proving there was a first time for everything, Alex did exactly as Erik had told him to. “How do you know you weren’t followed, or that they let you escape on purpose so you could lead them right to us?” 

“Telepath,” Emma said, pointedly enough that none of her facetious endearments were necessary. “I checked, and I wasn’t exactly gentle. The ones who only had splitting migraines were lucky. But it doesn’t matter—they were going to come for you whether or not I cooperated. Someone wants you back badly, Charles.”

“They can’t have him,” Hank said firmly. Perhaps it was the location—he’d always been more confident in the lab—or the implication that the school he’d helped rebuild was in danger of failing again or the direct threat to Charles, but he seemed entirely at ease in his Beast form and barely fazed by Emma’s message. Erik had seen him like this on the nights he had come down to find Charles and discovered the two of them in the middle of untangling some problem with the technical specifications of Cerebro or the new Blackbird. Hank accumulated data and developed a strategy from there, which was one step further than Erik usually took himself. He also had a tendency to tap his pencil against the table while he was thinking; now he did it with a blue claw. “I’m assuming we don’t have a lot of time.” 

“Enough to take your students and run, if you go now. I came as fast I could but they won’t have to hitchhike or hope the next flight to Dallas is on schedule.”

“We have no intention of running. We’re perfectly capable of defending ourselves against whatever weapons they mistakenly believe can stop us,” Erik said, because Charles’s couldn’t seem to find words and the look on his face was one of utter devastation. 

It seemed natural to speak for them all. He’d seen the care Alex took to keep the children both safe and entertained during training, he knew how much time and effort Hank had put into his research and prototypes; Ororo’s happiness at using her powers freely had only just overcome her homesickness, and Scott and Jean felt more comfortable here than they ever had with parents and foster families who feared them. The school and the mansion were inextricable from each other and inextricable from both was the future of these young mutants—and all young mutants, if Charles could only regain his powers and reach them. He’d have no chance of either if they ran. Cerebro would be destroyed, Hank would lose all his work. 

In the end it was very simple. The mansion was a sanctuary and sanctuaries had to be protected.

“Alex and I will handle as much as we can when they’re in range, Raven and Hank will take the Blackbird. You and Charles and the students will be safe in the bunkers,” he added.

Emma was glaring at him like he’d missed the point entirely. “They have numbers and they have speed and they’re ready for you, Magneto. Plastic and ceramic, glass, nylon, wherever they can use it. You didn’t exactly leave much to the imagination about what you can and can’t do when you wrecked the facility you found him in. They’ve gotten creative because of you.”

“And I’ll thank you not to relegate me to my own bunker, please,” Charles put in shortly.

Erik gave in to the urge to pace a tight circuit back and forth between the two groups; the movement helped expend some of the nervous energy that might otherwise have leaked out into the surrounding metal and damaged delicate instruments. He could hear little hitches in his breathing and there was a strange twisted sensation near his solar plexus, like he’d been punched there. After a moment he recognized it as surprise. He’d allowed himself to relax under the guise of recovery for so long that he was taken aback by an entirely predictable turn of events. Of course the humans would come for them; of course the kind of monsters who’d tortured Charles so methodically wouldn’t let him go so easily. Tearing a single facility to the ground was like chopping the tail off a lizard—given time there would be another, different in detail but serving the same function—and he had drilled that lesson into Raven’s head too many times to have forgotten it so quickly himself. Perhaps he’d not been so immune to Charles’s subconscious manipulation after all or perhaps the weakness was entirely his own—it made no difference when he’d wasted an unconscionable amount of time playing house instead of preparing to meet the enemy. Charles made him shortsighted, willing to exist in the moment instead of widening his gaze toward the future. He’d forgotten that too.

Erik always had lashed out when he felt cornered. He turned to Charles. The nastiness of the words tasted sour in his throat, like sickness.

“You agree with Emma, is that it? After all they did to you? You’re given the chance to strike back, to return to them one small part of the pain they inflicted on you, and you’d rather flee than take it.”

“Jesus, Erik—”

“Charles can answer for himself, Mystique,” Erik interrupted without looking at her. 

Actually there seemed to be a chance that Charles couldn’t. Erik wondered what expression was on his face that made Charles stare at him like that, with such a mixture of shock and sadness and disappointment that made something inside Erik tremble and quake like a building built on a faultline. Apparently he wasn’t the only one who had allowed himself to be surprised by the obvious.

Everyone and everything else had faded and become unimportant; it was only the two of them now, the way it was only ever the two of them in moments like this.

“Nothing has changed, Charles,” he said quietly. “It never will.”

“You certainly haven’t,” Charles said. 

The self-loathing that filled him burst forth as bitter laughter. Erik crossed the room in slow, predatory strides, the way the projection had an eternal two days ago, until Charles was forced to tilt his head back or break eye contact. He wanted to say _hope hurts, doesn’t it?_ but sensed it would be counterproductive to the plan forming in the back of his mind, still so amorphous that he didn’t dare dwell on it for fear of it dissipating into nothing. Instead he said, “Save your lectures, professor. How much time you think we have? Minutes, hours, an entire day? How far could you and your children run before they arrive, burn this place to the ground, and begin the hunt again?” 

“Do you have anything to contribute besides rhetorical questions?” Charles snapped. 

Erik recognized the irritation as a weak deflection of fear and went for the low blow without hesitation. “If you want the Xavier Institute to exist past tomorrow, if you want Jean and Scott and Ororo to have a _home_ past tomorrow, you must be willing to defend it and them. The way you couldn’t—or wouldn’t—the first time you opened your school. What you do here is crucial for the future of mutantkind, Charles. Young mutants the world over need to know there is a place they can escape oppression, grow up in an atmosphere of acceptance where their powers are celebrated. They need hope. That’s what this place is, a symbol of hope, and it _must_ stand strong.”

“I thought we were cowards hiding away from the world, refusing to help our own people,” Charles said snidely, but his derision was undermined by the quiver in his voice as the words hit home. Erik pressed his advantage.

“I was wrong about that. When they’re older let them choose for themselves, but the front lines are no place for a ten-year-old. The humans are the ones who’ve brought the fight to your children, not me. Send them away with Emma if you’d rather but the rest of us will remain here and show them that we’re not vermin to be eradicated.”

For the second time that morning Charles was prevented from responding by the sudden arrival of students—all three of them this time, with Jean clutching Scott’s hand on one side and Ororo’s on the other and looking more shaken than they’d ever seen her.

“There are bad people coming.” Jean sounded closer to tears with every word and her face was wet by the time she finished. “I can feel them, they’re thinking about us and how they want to hurt us. There are so many of them and they’re coming so fast. They’ll be here by lunchtime, what are we supposed to do?”


	21. Erik (3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Big mouth!Erik. Dark!Charles. Things go predictably.

The children weren’t crying anymore, which meant someone must have seen to them. Taken them aside, said the right comforting things—the grownups are talking, it’ll be alright, kids, just sit tight in this corner and we’ll explain everything soon. It was probably Alex, who the children thought was cool because he was Scott’s big brother and were in awe of because his mutation was flashy and destructive. They didn’t understand how real power worked, how it was hardly ever flashy. Flash was a distraction, a ploy to gain time at best, and it was far too late for that now. They were out of time—had been for days, really, without knowing it. They needed real power.

Erik wasn’t seeing the room. His eyes were open but in front of them was that haze that came when he went deep inside himself. In the white room it had been a blessing that he could only calm his mind at the expense of his place in the real world. He had passed entire days that way, floating on subconscious waves of memory and fantasy, making his thoughts deep and still, allowing new realizations and epiphanies to bubble to the top of his awareness. Clarity came then that he could never have experienced while distracted by his body—a useless thing that felt hunger, claustrophobia, the adrenaline rushes that made him dizzy and breathless, and always, always reached out for a sense that wasn’t there and ached in its absence.

Embodiment had been one of the hardest parts of his identity to recapture, after his rescue. Certainly the strangest.

Now he set it aside again. The plan that had begun to form during his argument with Charles before the children arrived was rising slowly into conscious thought, unfurling like the petals of a flower in swamp water. Nature gave way before necessity in allowing it to thrive. 

The pieces came disjointed as his thoughts at first. 

The humans had expected him to be here, they were ready for him with an arsenal that far exceeded plastic guns and ceramic bullets. No armed forces could function entirely without metal—even if it was only miniscule components of helicopters, transport vehicles, communications devices—but his fine control still wasn’t what it had been. Could he grasp a handful of wires miles away and use them to destroy an entire army? 

Jean had sensed their minds before he sensed their equipment. Did that mean a surfeit of minds or a deficit of metal? 

If she could feel them they weren’t wearing helmets. That seemed suicidal but then again they couldn’t have expected Emma or Jean and last they’d heard of Charles he was powerless and close to catatonic. That left Magneto the greatest threat. And with Emma burned out, Jean an untrained child, and Charles unstable, perhaps the humans had come to right conclusion even with the wrong information. 

More pieces fell into place. The Blackbird needed two to fly it. It would have to be Hank and Raven. They were short-range fighters and if they waited until the enemy was that close to engage they might as well stand still and present their throats for slitting. Alex’s force and blast radius had both increased exponentially since Erik had last seen him; there might be a weapon of substance under that flashiness after all. And even if Erik couldn’t use the enemy’s own weapons against them he had every piece of metal in the mansion at his disposal, and he was reasonably sure Charles would rather lose his collection of antique cars than his life. 

If the worst happened, if they couldn’t hold the mansion, the children wouldn’t be safe in the bunkers. Emma was right—they needed to run now and hope the humans didn’t comb the wreckage of the mansion for bodies. Erik would pull the place down on his own head if it gave Charles more time to escape; he wouldn’t survive captivity a second time.

The grounds were level and trimmed but the wheelchair would become a problem when they hit the woods at the property’s edge where Charles would be trapped at worst, a terrible hindrance at best. At full strength in her diamond form Emma could have carried him effortlessly but she was exhausted herself, possibly not even capable of shifting forms at all. Her physical strength was at a low ebb and her telepathic strength good for a few messages passed mind to mind and not much else. 

“I never knew it could be so easy,” Charles had said in the library two nights ago, still half-trapped in the memory of taking over another man’s body. “Stepping into someone’s skin is like…putting on a new pair of trousers. Nothing simpler. I hadn’t known.”

Erik was beginning to see the outline of the whole now. Emma and Charles each had what the other needed: Charles had full energy and power, Emma had a secondary mutation that gave her immense fortitude and strength. And they were both telepaths, the only two of all of them who had direct access to each other’s minds and by extension bodies.

“Use her, Charles,” he said, interrupting someone else if the glares sent his way were anything to go by. 

“Pardon me?” Charles said, in that tone that Erik knew meant he needed to rephrase quickly or the conversation was over before it began.

“Work with Emma. One unit in two bodies, like you said. She’ll give you mobility if you give her the strength and guide her movements. It’s the only way the two of you and the children will make it out of here alive.”

“You’re mad,” Charles said flatly.

Erik shook his head with impatience, not denial. “We can talk about that later. Right now you need to _go_.”

“I can’t decide which of your assumptions is more absurd, that you think I’ll leave you here to fight an army on your own or that you think I’ll use my powers in that way ever again.”

“Use your powers in what way?” Emma said warily.

Before Erik or Charles could deliver what would undoubtedly have been a slightly biased version of events, Raven tapped her temple and said, “Catch, Em.”

From the way Emma winced and then hissed a little, Raven had bundled up her relevant memories and thrown them into Emma’s mind, straining her already-exhausted telepathy. It was faster, simpler, and Raven always had had less trouble with telepathy when it served a strategic purpose. Emma processed the memories for a few seconds before she stopped wincing and turned an appraising eye on Charles.

“Now that _is_ impressive. You do hold yourself back, don’t you?” she said. “Not a bad idea, either.”

“I’m listening if anyone has a better one,” Erik said, looking at the rest of them. His odds were better than he had expected. It would pain Alex and Hank to agree with him but his plan had the virtue of prioritizing Charles’s safety and putting him in control of Emma, who they didn’t trust not to save her own skin at the first possible moment. Raven was still so consumed with guilt over her failure to rescue Emma that she would do anything to ensure her continued freedom. And Emma would get exactly what she wanted: energy reserves where she lacked them, access to her powers that she didn’t currently have. Charles looked like he had so many objections he didn’t know where to start but even he would have to listen if every other person present overruled him.

But because Charles had a history of picking the worst moments to stand his moral ground, he said stubbornly, “It’s too dangerous. You can’t ask me to do this, Erik. You remember what happened the last time, and you remember what happened the last time I remembered what happened the last time. We’re safer if I don’t use my powers at all.”

“This is nothing like the last time,” Raven said, trying to be gentle in circumstances that didn’t really allow for it. “You’re in complete control, you’re healthy, no one’s trying to hurt you, Emma’s fully aware and consenting—don’t think of it as taking her over, think of it as…pooling your resources.”

Charles scoffed, but the bitterness wasn’t enough to hide the real reason for his hesitation. Fear. It always came down to fear, to Charles not trusting himself, to him putting the safety of inferior beings above his own health and happiness. To him never understanding how special he was. So caught up in trying to be the good man he needed to be that he didn’t see that he was already the best of them all. Erik grit his teeth to keep from screaming at the unfairness, the stupidity of it all—trust took time, time, they had no _time_ , and wasn’t it Charles himself who had said he would trust Erik as much as Erik trusted him? What else had Erik been doing these past few weeks, remaining at Charles’s side even when he knew his free will could be taken from at any moment, when he could see the effects of telepathic manipulation in behavioral changes and shifting moods like the afterimage of the sun burnt on the backs of his eyelids? Couldn’t Charles return the goddamn favor?

Emma was saying something about just trying, making her lift her arm or touch her nose; she would meet him halfway telepathically and steady his powers, all her shields were down, she was ready. 

“I know how much you’ll blame yourself if you so much as stub my big toe so honey, I’m really not worried,” she said. 

Charles had set his jaw stubbornly and made his expression stern and forbidding in that way that meant he considered a subject closed, but there was panic in his eyes that made Erik want to smash something. 

“Charles, you won’t hurt her,” he said. He meant to sound calm, to treat it like the simple fact it was, but his composure had the tensile strength of the last few strands of a very frayed rope.

“And how could you possibly know that?”

Tension had changed the pitch of Charles’s voice. It was high and shrill and grated on Erik’s nerves. “If you could just trust me, Charles—”

“Not until you tell me how can you be so—”

The rope snapped; something was falling; the crash was imminent. Erik thought he might be shouting.

“Because you never hurt the rest of us! Look around you, you use your powers every day and you’ve never harmed anyone. You’ve had the chance to make us do anything you wanted, you could have convinced me or your students that you were right about everything so completely that we’d never question you again and instead the only thing you did do was make certain your household ran smoothly! What makes you think your telepathy will be any more dangerous when you use it consciously?”

“Oh, fuck,” Raven said. 

Erik realized he was breathing heavily. Charles looked like he might not be breathing at all. 

“What—what did you just say?” Hank stammered, at the same that Alex said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” Raven said again. 

There was something eerie about the way Charles turned his head to look at her. 

“One of these things is not like the others,” he said. “You don’t sound surprised, Raven. Not pleased, but not surprised. Has Erik given away a secret the two of you were keeping from me?”

To her credit, Raven didn’t lie, didn’t even hesitate before telling the truth. Her gold eyes were molten, though Erik wasn’t sure whether they were tears of regret, sadness, or fear. Her instinct for self-preservation had always exceeded his own, a primal roar in the face of danger when his was a whisper at best, but even he could feel the change in the room like the sudden soaring of barometric pressure before a storm, something the body registered before the mind. 

“We didn’t know how to tell you,” she said. “You were so terrified of your powers already, we didn’t know what you might do if you found out.”

“Will someone— _anyone_ —tell me what’s going on?” Hank demanded. 

“His powers have been healing. Reasserting themselves subconsciously,” Erik said, not looking away from Charles. He was suddenly reminded of that time in Venezuela when he’d encountered a mountain lion near a mark’s summer chalet; the way its eyes had bored into him bright and inquisitive while it held its body perfectly still, and he’d known the wrong response would set into motion a sequence of events he might not survive. He took a steadying breath, went on. “You question everything, Beast, and you never questioned the state of his telepathy after his rescue, never mentioned rehabilitating his powers with the regimen you used after Washington. You treated his physical injuries and went back to renovating the Danger Room. When was the last time you worked on Cerebro? When was the last time you talked about his telepathy at all?” 

“That’s not proof of anything,” Alex said stubbornly. “That’s so entirely subjective it’s a—a conspiracy theory!”

“Tell me the subject of our last argument, then. Tell me the last time any of the children needed real discipline. Tell me the last time you or Beast told me that you’d turn me over to the government yourselves if I hurt your professor again.”

“It doesn’t matter, Charles. You didn’t hurt anyone—you helped, even. We would have said something otherwise. You were just…healing in your own way,” Raven said, catching the minute changes in his expression with a shapeshifter’s talent for observation. Devastation and unnatural calm, back and forth—an emotional ricochet that meant nothing to her because she’d never seen it before, but Erik had, two nights ago. Only these changes were coming faster, as if they’d been compressed to fit in the little time they had left before the humans came.

“Are you certain that was your logic?” Charles had turned from Raven back to Erik with that same serpentine way of moving, and Erik knew the question wasn’t for her. “Are you entirely certain it had nothing to do with fear for your own safety? Or was it simply a child’s wish for summer holidays to go on forever?”

“Yes,” Erik said. “To all of them. Now think of what you tried to do to yourself last night and tell me we were wrong to give you more time.”

“Wait, what _did_ you try to do to yourself last night?” Hank said. His frustration was beginning to show—ignorance didn’t sit well with him, not in the space where he felt most confident and not when it came to Charles after ten years of knowing more about him than anyone else. Erik would have admired his tenacity if it hadn’t been so poorly timed.

Ignoring Hank entirely, Charles laughed. “‘Give me more time’? That’s what you’ve been telling yourself you did? That’s euphemistic even for you. You lied to me, Erik. You deceived me. You knew what I was capable of, you knew how I would feel about it, and you deliberately kept the truth from me because…what, you wanted to _play chess_ a while longer?”

He had slipped into a mocking sing-song by the end, the kind of tonal shift that evoked an instinctive shudder. There was a wrongness to it, like nails scraping a blackboard or a baby wailing. Erik tried not to flinch, tried not to let even the slightest hint of hesitation or regret color his thoughts in case Charles was listening in, because he had made a choice that night they had played chess for the first time and he’d wondered _why_ it was the first time; and yes, Raven had encouraged him to keep the realization a secret, but Erik was the one who had looking down at Charles sleeping in their bed and decided to let it go on because it gave him what he wanted. Safety and more time—the only things he ever wanted, it seemed. And it felt somehow a betrayal of the memories he’d hoarded since, to regret the decision itself. An apology would be disingenuous, too close to another lie. So he met Charles’s scorn with all the stoicism he could muster, felt the rage beneath the laughter, and was strangely calm when the rest of the room went hazy around them and Charles stood up from his chair. Like he’d been expecting it all to lead here.

“Are you going to do it now?” Erik said. “Erase me, like you were going to last time? You said it would make me happy. I can’t imagine that’s at the top of your priority list, based on recent events.”

“Which recent events are those?” the projection of Charles said. “Are you referring to the human army on its way to destroy us or your total betrayal of my trust? And you think _I_ was manipulating _you_. Good Lord, what a morning.”

“You seem rather more upset about the second than the first. They’re going to kill you and your children unless you go now, Charles, that hasn’t changed.”

“‘They’re going to kill you and your children,’” Charles repeated, again in that mocking sing-song. He sounded bored, young, and spoiled, an exaggerated version of all the qualities Erik disliked most about him, but knowing it was an act didn’t make it any less annoying. “Has anyone ever told you you’re quite the broken record? You really ought to ask Raven for help with a new shtick.”

Erik bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper in his mouth but it wasn’t enough to quell his own rage, which was rallying after shock had momentarily taken precedence. He remembered that Charles had been corporeal enough to kiss the last time this happened, so he took the chance: two long steps to close the distance and a shove with all his strength behind it. He felt the impact from palms to shoulders but the result was less than impressive—instead of going flying, as he’d hoped, Charles’s body flickered and stabilized an extra few feet away. He gave himself an exaggerated up-and-down appraisal, then smirked, shook his head condescendingly.

Erik barely restrained himself from trying again anyway. “You’re acting like a fucking child, we haven’t—”

“If you’re about to say something about time or lack thereof, look around. _Nanoseconds_ are passing in the real world, Erik, we’re only _out of time_ because I’ve pulled us out of it.”

Erik stared. The thickness of the air seemed to indicate distance more psychological than literal; with immense focus the haze dissipated enough to see the eerily still bodies of everyone else in the room. It felt like entire minutes passed before Raven’s chest rose with a single inhale. In the corner, a tear fell down Jean’s cheek with impossible slowness. Cold shock doused his anger for a second time, a feeling no more pleasant than it been the first.

“See?” Charles said. “Only this time I _mean_ to use my powers.”

“You’re also not yourself,” Erik pointed out, ignoring the not-terribly-subtle dig. “We’ve been here before, Charles.”

“Not _quite_ here. Incoming armed forces aside, the last time we were anything like here I was struggling to accept an unbearable truth about myself. Now I’m struggling to accept an unbearable truth about you.” Charles paused, tapping the first two fingers of his right hand against his temple so hard it was more of a stabbing motion. There was anger behind it but something unconscious and automatic too, like a glitch. Erik was torn between the desires to take the moment of quiet as an opportunity to defend himself, to ask what was so unbelievable about him doing something reprehensible for Charles’s protection after all the other reprehensible things he’d done in his life that had hurt Charles instead, and the need to hold those hands in his own until they’d stopped shaking. He hesitated too long; before he could say anything Charles burst out, “What happened to ‘I’ve never lied to you, I don’t intend to start now’? And if you tell me that technically you never lied to me I _will_ knock you across this room, Erik, don’t think I won’t.”

“We were going to tell you. When you were ready, when you hadn’t just regained a traumatic memory and then tried to suppress your own powers!”

“Ah, so you thought you had everything under control. What a terrible inconvenience this incoming death squad must be for you, then, interrupting another one of your brilliant plans. And now here we are. How do you see this playing out?”

Erik took a step back, retreating on instinct. He’d known intellectually that Charles was capable of this kind of viciousness—for all that he was good and almost too forgiving, he wasn’t weak—but he’d never expected to have it manifest so suddenly or be directed so specifically at him. He wondered if Charles was in his head, rifling through his guilt and doubts with careless mental fingers and choosing the exact words that would hurt him most. Would he even listen, if Erik told him to get out, or would he laugh in that same condescending way and say it wasn’t pleasant, was it, when someone manipulated you like that? And he thought again of Cuba and Washington, all the times he had hurt Charles and never paid for it, walking away like there would never be consequences, like there would never be a day when he pushed too far and Charles declared him an enemy simply for the sake of self-preservation.

“How this plays out depends entirely on you,” he said, so rattled that the only thing he could think of was the truth.

“Yes, it does,” Charles agreed easily. “And your fantasy of holding them off while the children and I escape just won’t suffice, however romantic and heroic it might be.”

“Your students need—”

“Be very careful speaking of my students,” Charles interrupted. “You’ve put them in danger since you brought me home just as surely as the humans are now, so don’t presume to tell me how to protect them.”

When he stepped forward Erik took another step back, remembering the threat to knock him across the room, but Charles moved too quickly: he had Erik’s face clasped between his hands within a fraction of a second, his grip too tight to pull free. At the distance of only a few inches Erik’s gaze couldn’t help but go to his mouth; he thought that would probably always be true. Charles noticed and his lips twisted, merciless.

“There’s something you need to understand,” he said. “I am myself. Right now, like this. Don’t underestimate how far I’ll go for my students. Don’t underestimate how far I’ll go for my sister, my friends, or you. Now go.”

He released his grip and stepped away. Alarm bells that sounded like low wails began to go off in Erik’s head and he tried to reach out, to stay _stop_ or _wait_ or _Charles_ , somehow fully convinced that if he could just get one finger hooked into Charles’s cardigan he could stop whatever was about to happen. He couldn’t move, not that single finger, not his vocal cords, not his eyelids. The haze was intensifying again and no amount of desperate focus dissipated it this time. He tried to at least keep the blue of Charles’s eyes in his diminishing field of vision but either they were closed or Charles—the projection of Charles—was gone.

The last thing he heard came in a musing tone, without a hint of mockery.

“Perhaps you were right about the humans after all, Erik.”

When he next became aware of his surroundings it was in pieces, like the incomplete merging of reality and an especially vivid dream. The air was cool; he was standing in shade. Everything was green and brown and smelled like sap and living things. There was pressure on both his hands—Ororo on one side and Scott on the other, both looking as bewildered as he must have, and ahead of him were Raven and Emma and Jean. Even as he struggled to accept it, he knew they were deep in the forest off the edge of the Xavier property. 

He also knew that there no point in looking around for Charles. He had taken them over and sent them away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hahaha guess who lied about not having another Erik chapter, she said as she wrote another Erik chapter.
> 
> (i have like 5% confidence in this one--is it in-character? does it make sense? it is incredibly anticlimactic and/or invalidating of the whole story thus far? WHO KNOWS--but whatevs, i've promised myself to have this done by XMA so on we march.)


	22. Charles (1)

There were three Charles Xaviers in his head. That was unusual. Two wasn’t unheard of—sometimes he still had flashes of memories belonging to his future self that must have slipped over their link when Logan joined them together before Paris. His sixtieth birthday party, meeting Erik’s grandchildren, the day they locked the mansion’s gates for the last time and fled north. It was simpler to think of that very wise, very bald man as the Professor, while he was still just…Charles. 

Now they seemed to have company. Xavier, Charles. Test subject, experiment, less-than-adorable lab rat. Maybe he’d been there all along, the Charlie his stepfather had sent to the hospital so many times after innumerable “accidents,” hiding in his subconscious the way he’d hidden in closets and under stairwells, shrinking away from the real world until all his defenses had been knocked away by new trauma. Maybe he was new, born sometime between the sarin gas and the PCP the way Magneto had been born sometime between Erik turning the satellite dish and killing Shaw.

As he made his way from the lab to Cerebro, Charles wondered if he was losing his mind. He’d touched the minds of insane people before and they had a slipperiness he couldn’t feel in his own. Connections slid away from each other before they were fully realized and their trains of thought, lacking the stability of logic, careened off the tracks easily. It was disorienting. He didn’t feel particularly disoriented, his trains of thought ran smooth and rational; there just happened to be several of them. Besides, wasn’t there some adage about crazy people never thinking they were crazy? Though that did seem questionable, scientifically.

“You’re not mad,” he said out loud. “You’re a telepath. It’s not madness if you can control it.”

The third Charles had certainly been present during a conversation he could only remember in patches. Like his memories from the first time he’d projected, they came in silent flashes: Erik lunging for him with fingers splayed and teeth bared, an attack motivated by despair that had no grace or control behind it; Erik searching the room, the way his eyes widened in awe as he realized everyone else around them was suspended in time like mosquitos in amber; Erik squaring his shoulders in that way that he thought meant he was readying himself for action but really meant he was bracing himself for another loss. Erik’s victories came at awful prices—his defeats, too.

There had been bright anger, vicious words. A kind of regression to the worst days after Cuba, after Erik’s first betrayal, when he’d thought things so dark and hurtful they became illogical and finally just nonsense. This time something had lanced the wound before the hurt became too much to be borne—if he could only remember—

Another silent flash: those mutable eyes inches away, the slackness of his mouth, the short gasping inhales—Erik’s fear. He could feel it clinging and spreading like ice crystals on a windowpane against his shields, weakened as they were after his unsuccessful attempt to shore them up the night before. A cold, creeping thing. The fear from the first seconds after the bullet struck, not fear for himself but fear for Charles, fear of failure, fear that he’d, again, failed to protect his loved ones. One more death, one more ghost to carry with him always because Erik never had learned to let go of his dead. One day it would be one too many.

_Not today._

That fear hadn’t extinguished Charles’s anger so much as it had…redirected it. With a detached, almost mathematical certainty he’d thought that the loss of whatever trust he’d begun to rebuild in Erik was enough loss for one day. He wasn’t entirely sure which version of himself had decided what came next. He only knew that skimming the surface thoughts of Erik, Raven, Hank, and Alex for all pertinent strategic information had been the work of seconds, and sending them away with telepathic orders not to regain consciousness until they’d been walking for an hour even simpler than that. They’d be deep in the forest by then, hidden, safe.

_Did you want them safe or out of your way?_

The voice sounded like his own, so he ignored it, focused on navigating the halls deep under the mansion.

Cerebro’s doors hissed open at his command for the first time since before he was captured. The recycled air was still and cool; the vaulted ceiling glinted as light hit its metal panels. Dust hung in the air as he approached the control panel and headpiece at the end of the plinth. Charles had the sense of an enormous jungle cat curled up and sleeping, one false move away from sinking teeth and claw into too-fallible flesh and shaking him apart. He initiated the power-up sequence and watched the panels shift, the indicators blink and then turn green, heard the hydraulics’ hum increase in pitch as Cerebro stretched itself awake.

“Hello, my friend,” he said. Speaking aloud kept him connected to his body, which was important for just another few minutes. “I hope you’re well-rested, because we have work to do. We’ve both been sleeping for quite long enough.”

Keeping his telepathy reined in was more difficult than he’d expected. His powers weren’t rusty from disuse so much as they were sore and shaky, like an atrophied muscle. They wanted to stretch, to push their real limits instead of the absurdly constrictive ones he’d held them to. The minds of Erik, Raven and the others glowed warm in his perception; they were moving quickly, half way across the grounds by now. A woman and her son were picking berries near the lake a few miles away. He touched their minds gently, implanted an order to go home and pay no attention to anything strange happening near the mansion behind them. 

Then the real threat—one hundred military minds filled with orders to capture if possible, kill if necessary, and bomb his school to dust on the way out. Xavier, Charles recognized the voice that had given the orders, saw the same face that had smiled as it tortured him refracted through a hundred unique perceptions, and laughed. Of course the General wouldn’t come himself; he would be waiting with a new lab on the other side of the country, because he was smart enough to understand that power was circumstantial and he only had it when Charles was drugged, restrained, and cut off from his telepathy. He wouldn’t risk them meeting again until those circumstances were met. But he had risked sending his men without helmets; either he was cruel enough to think they were expendable or stupid enough to think Charles wasn’t a threat.

_Don’t they have a right to know that their commanding officer doesn’t care if they live or die?_

_No no no, stop, wait. Have patience._ Still his voice, but calmer, deeper, which meant the Professor, or the part of him that was becoming the Professor. Would become, was already—identity was as fraught a concept as time, he found. 

Cerebro was almost ready. The mechanical hum had become a high-pitched whine as the machine ran its final initiation sequences. Charles lifted the helmet and held it in his lap, using the smooth chill of the metal under his fingertips to ground him as he let his telepathy stretch out toward the approaching army. Right now they were too many, too far away, too spread out in an array of combat vehicles for his powers to be useful as anything but a battering ram. If he tried he could implant the truth about their commander or even wipe their minds from this distance, but there was no guarantee it would be smooth and simultaneous and he couldn’t take the risk that someone sent a distress call back to base. 

_Overplay your hand and you’ll be doing cleanup up and down the chain of command for months, or worse. Be patient just a little longer and you can end this today._

The Professor soothed the prisoner, who snarled but went quiet. Charles lifted the helmet onto his head and closed his eyes—

_a hiss of sparks, the smell of burnt hair_

—and opened them again to find himself sprawled on the platform with ringing ears and a bleeding nose. He lay there for a moment, stunned, until the wheezing laughter filling the air registered as his own.

“Well,” he huffed as he pushed up on his elbows. “That didn’t go quite as expected, did it.”

At least he could console himself that if—when—he lost control the telepathic backlash would hit him first, not the minds he was reaching for. Knocking the entire company unconscious at once would be a quick way to both decimate the approaching force and guarantee it would be followed by another, far more dangerous one. Not to mention his own people were out there still, well within his powers’ blast radius—and for that matter so was the nearest town, and anyone who happened to be driving on nearby highways. Better him than innocent bystanders.

His chair had rolled several inconvenient feet away and the helmet dangled from the wires that secured it to the machine. Re-triangulating the two objects with his uncooperative body took long minutes that he begrudged only because there weren’t minutes to spare; otherwise he would have appreciated the chance to catch his breath, perhaps investigate his body’s complaints as symptoms of damage and not obstacles to be overcome. Instead he blotted his nose on his sleeve, smearing blood on the blue wool, and shook his head until he could convince himself that the ringing in his ears had abated slightly. 

_Zero to sixty a bit quick there, old chap. Dial it back a notch, why don’t you?_

The temptation—in fact, the natural instinct—was to let his powers flow into Cerebro and out into the world as soon as he put on the helmet. As he’d just discovered, it was rather like turning on a garden hose only to find the water pressure was better suited to a fire hose. The second time he tried to hold back, even though keeping his telepathy confined to his own head while his shields were down and the power of Cerebro beckoned was so difficult he almost forgot why it was important. He found an equilibrium, measured the strength of his telepathy, felt and resisted the lure of Cerebro, and finally eased his hold on his powers. Use the machine, not let the machine use him, that was the trick. He thought for a moment he’d managed to get it right before he felt a sensation like a kick in the head and lost control again. 

Instantly one hundred and ten new minds surged into his awareness, entire life stories and current sensory input, anxieties and itches. It was overwhelming, unbearable, and just as suddenly gone, like a lightbulb flaring bright and then exploding from a surge of electricity.

He only realized he’d broken the connection when he heard a rhythmic metallic click and looked down to see the dangling helmet swinging into the side of the control panel. He must have thrown it from him with a good amount of force. Blood was running over his lips again and he was sweating lightly so he pulled off his cardigan and used it to wipe it his face.

_You felt them. Did they feel you? Did you give yourself away so easily, you bloody fool?_

He fumbled for the helmet, nearly overbalanced in his chair, caught himself hard with one hand on the control panel. His movements were clumsy with panic. At this very second any one of those soldiers could be calling in a warning that the telepath was active, reinforcements were needed, abort mission. And how long had it been since he ordered Erik and the others away? He’d felt their minds too, six of the ten in his range besides the incoming armed forces, but only a general awareness of presence in the woods a few miles away, not enough to know whether they had regained consciousness yet. Surely at least one of the adults would have reached back if they’d felt him in their minds, if only to yell at him, but for all he knew they could be awake and charging to _his_ rescue right now, exactly as well-intentioned and disastrous as any of Erik’s usual plans.

He slammed the helmet down on his head and gave a single command, verbally and telepathically. 

“If everyone could please just. Remain. _Still_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> homeslices, what will i do when this story is over? who will i _be_? will i look out my window at night and sigh forlornly at the fact that i spent five months writing over 70k words about these dummies, the kids that relied on them, and the badass women who inexplicably tolerated them? will i still think of all of you who commented/bookmarked/kudos-ed with the fondness of someone who did not realize how desperately they craved validation from internet strangers until it was too late?
> 
> yes, my dudes. the answer is yes.


	23. Charles (2)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for this chapter go to listerinezero, who said "but what if Charles was like Erik I got you this thing! and Erik was like nooooo" and the ever-amazing garnettrees for reassuring me that I was not an entirely directionless and terrible writer :)

It immediately became clear that he should have added _and calm_ to his command. None of the people under his control could so much as twitch without him allowing it, and all of them realized it at the same time. Strong emotions had a kind of a telepathic flavor and panic was sour, so unpleasant he shuddered.

Then again, perhaps he would have been asking a little much. The situation hardly inspired calm, did it? All of the minds he could feel were human, none of whom had ever known a telepath, much less experienced the rather jarring sensation of one taking up sudden residence in their heads. At least half of them had had doubts that telepaths even existed, before approximately ten seconds ago. Sure, the papers said, their commanding officer said, even the president said—but it seemed so improbable, telepathy. 

Charles might have laughed. He wasn’t entirely sure what his body was doing, back in Cerebro.

110—such a nice, even number. Six were his people, still obediently marching north away from the mansion. Four were a family on a camping holiday whose minds he quickly pushed into unconsciousness; they would wake up in a few hours on the bank of a nearby lake convinced the whole thing had been a dream. The other hundred were soldiers sent to kidnap him and destroy his school. From the shock in their thoughts, it hadn’t occurred to them that he might have a problem with that, or at least that he’d be in the position to resist.

_Yes, you’re ready for Magneto, aren’t you? I’m afraid he’s unavailable. After all the lovely weapons you built with non-ferrous materials. Put them down, please._

His voice piped into their heads like smooth jazz in an elevator, unwanted but impossible to escape. The comparison struck him as hilarious and he must have shared that amusement too, given the sudden confusion that rippled through their minds and back to his. That confusion was followed by another wave of sour panic in enough of the soldiers that he noticed it and dove deep into the nearest mind to understand its source—a newlywed in the foremost helicopter who’d heard that kind of high, manic laughter in sanitariums when his mother was ill.

_Oh, I see. Yes, I’ll admit I’ve pondered the same question, though “nutcase” and “loon” are taking it a little far, don’t you think? If it helps, I do seem to be in excellent control of my faculties and my powers so your odds of—having your brains scrambled like eggs, well, that is an image, Captain—are low as long as everyone simply behaves themselves._

He wasn’t sure at which point he had gone from speaking to the one soldier to all of them again, but he felt the impulse to nod frantically fire and be immediately repressed by his own command one hundred times. Well, it wasn’t _his_ fault their minds were practically identical. Deep enough down they would at least be distinguishable from each other but he had no interest in that. He thought perhaps he should. Didn’t he believe that all lives had value, no individual worth more than any other, something platitudinous like that? It was difficult to remember when he was so distracted—not by the task of holding them, which was nothing, but by their identical surface thoughts, spread across a hundred minds like an oil slick over the open ocean. Each of them had an impressive kill record and a certain moral flexibility; each was mutant-, xeno-, and homophobic and had volunteered for this mission. Their orders were locked in the forefront of their minds. Primary mission: regain possession of Xavier, Charles. Secondary mission: capture if possible, kill if necessary any other mutants present, except one. Tertiary mission: assassination of Magneto. 

_Of two minds about that, I see_ , he mused, lazily passing over the emotional resonances attached to the orders. _No pun intended, of course. Quite a few of you think it’s a shame this order didn’t come two months ago when he was in that plastic box—much easier to kill a man who can’t get away. And the rest of you…well, you’re rather looking forward to the hunt, aren’t you? You want to see him trapped. You want to see him terrified. You’re—_

Flares of pain went off like mini explosions all around him. He became disoriented, pulled back, let the distance clear his head until he understood that it wasn’t his pain at all—the telepathic connection was forcing his rage into the soldiers’ minds, which were buckling underneath it like dents in cheap metal. If they could have moved they would have been writhing in agony.

For a moment he was tempted to let it go on. Let them feel a fraction of what he had felt, tortured by the commanding officer whose orders they accepted with such unquestioning enthusiasm or what Erik had felt cut off from the world and his powers all those years. He could funnel pain into their brains without feeling it himself the same way he could hold them still without even thinking about it; it wouldn’t be enough to leave permanent psychological scars, he reasoned, just enough to make them understand, maybe even feel some empathy (sociopathic tendencies he sensed in a few of them aside). 

Instead he eased off, felt his rage cool and harden into something less impulsive and more lasting. He remembered the feel of the Professor’s mind even as the world literally ended around him, a calm in crisis that Charles had yet to develop on his own. Perhaps this was, or would be, the seed of it, though it grew in the shadows of a recklessness he couldn’t imagine the Professor would approve of. The soldier’s minds were calmer too in the way the minds of drowning men went still to conserve energy and there was a strange pressurized hush over them. Time had dilated and Charles had no conception of how long he’d been holding the soldiers still or what he’d meant to do with them after he took control or when he had directed them to the back lawn of the mansion. Yet there they were, armored trucks and jeeps and three helicopters arranged in orderly rows on the grass like the plastic army men he had played with as a child. At attention, perfectly silent, merely awaiting a commander.

 _Charles? What the_ hell _, Charles—_

_Erik, darling, if you could hold that thought—_

Something of his mental state must have been shared with Erik, whose mind went very quiet suddenly. He had burst into Charles’s awareness bright with irritation, leaking confused impressions of waking up in the forest, holding hands with Scott and Ororo like a trio of wax statues, new outrage overlying his memory of their argument the night before: _you cannot declare your powers a danger to all of us and make unilateral decisions about them at the same time!_ Now he faltered, knowing that Charles had done exactly that.

_Charles, tell me what’s going on. What have you done?_

What _had_ he done? Charles wasn’t entirely sure himself. He thought he probably ought to focus on that and not on Erik, whose mind he always had found too fascinating for his own good. Over a hundred minds in his control now and Erik’s was more intoxicating than the rest of them put together. The soldiers’ minds were so simple, consumed with mundanities and lacking any kind of sophistication or creativity, like a child’s clumsy line drawings. A poor sketch of humanity where Erik was a masterpiece. His only flaw was that he was too bright, like he was made from acrylic paint mixed with too little water.

 _I can’t talk to you right now, Erik,_ he thought. _Go back to sleep._

_No!_

Charles wasn’t sure it would work until it did and they were standing in a perfect telepathic replica of the mansion’s library at night. It was quiet and the air was warm and dancing with shadows from the firelight. Erik immediately lifted his hand to see if he could, holding it in front of his face like it belonged to a stranger. He was looking at Charles like he was a stranger too.

“I can’t concentrate with you yelling at me like that,” Charles said sternly, folding his arms across his chest.

“Concentrate on what?” Erik said. Charles raised an eyebrow and Erik’s face went pale. He took an involuntary step forward. “Charles, how many minds are you controlling right now?”

Charles gave him the mental image of the scene on the lawn outside through the eyes of one of the helicopter pilots, who he’d directed to stand up for a better view. It was high noon and the sun glinted off glass and plastic across the whole width of the lawn, blinding the soldier. Charles allowed him to blink before releasing him and opened his eyes again in the study.

“That’s too many,” Erik said. He’d come within arm’s length while Charles was absent and now guided him to the couch with a gentleness that felt somehow absurd, like he’d read a how-to guide on such behavior a long time ago and forgotten most of the steps. Still, it felt nice to sit down. And Erik looked so worried.

“It’s not too many,” Charles said, trying to reassure him. “It’s not _pleasant_ , but other minds so rarely are. Incredibly dull, most of them. Callow as well, these fellows, not very nice.” He became aware that he was speaking in sudden starts and stops, thinking he’d completed a sentence and then haphazardly tacking on new ideas as they occurred to him. “Besides, I had to stop them. They’re here to kill you. They want me and they’ll take the children too if they can but you, you’re not supposed to leave here.”

“What a surprise,” Erik said dryly. “And here I thought my relations with the humans were improving since I went into hiding.”

“They think you’ll never cooperate. They think you’ll never stop. Killing you is the only way to save themselves.”

“And what do you think, Charles?” Erik said, so quietly that a log popping in the fireplace almost drowned him out. 

Charles leaned his elbow on the back of the couch and propped his head in his hand, considering. There was a dull ache building behind his temple and paradoxically pressure on it helped. He swept the soldiers’ minds for some saving grace, a hint of remorse, a flash of doubt in their mission; the little he found wasn’t enough. He met Erik’s eyes and said, “I’m not convinced they deserve to save themselves.”

“Are they so truly the dregs of humanity, then?”

Charles sighed, massaged his temple with slightly more force. “No, I’m sure by common understanding they’re perfectly good men. Husbands, fathers, churchgoers, stray dog rescuers, and so forth. But they are hate-filled creatures who would have slept well after blowing this place sky-high. And if they don’t, more will be sent in their place, just as good and just as hateful, only they’ll be ready for me.”

He tapped his head to indicate helmets. Erik nodded and said nothing, because he wasn’t the kind of man to say _I told you so_ when he’d never wanted to be proven right. Their hands were joined on the couch between them and he rubbed his thumb over the back of Charles’s knuckles. The liminal space Charles had built for them was so convincing that he could feel the warmth of Erik’s skin and the calluses on his fingertips. After a moment Erik asked, “Does it surprise you?”

Charles smiled sadly. “I’m a telepath, Erik. Nothing surprises me.”

“What are you going to do? You can’t go on like this.”

It wasn’t a leading question this time. Erik wasn’t hoping for or expecting any particular answer. Faced with an immense source of power, a weapon that needed only to be pointed at its target, his mind was occupied entirely with the strain this must be putting on Charles, wondering if his skin looked chalky, thinking it was too much too fast and if Charles _had_ to touch minds that weren’t Erik’s own they ought to belong to good people, not monsters who would taint Charles’s mind with their own darkness like dirty fingerprints on precious crystal. There wasn’t much about Erik that was pure anymore but that belief had a child’s conviction behind it and Charles felt a surge of affection for him that was nearly overwhelming. In tandem with it a familiar feeling of recklessness soared and overshadowed the calmness that he’d been cultivating so carefully. The Professor’s voice was silent and the hundred hateful voices in his head were getting louder, more difficult to ignore.

“I’ll send them back to the General, if you want me to,” he said. “There’s a grenade launcher on one of those helicopters, machine guns on the rest, grenades, all kinds of artillery. Whatever base they came from won’t stand a chance. If not Nevada, then Dallas, Washington, anywhere in between, anywhere at all. You can have your war today, darling.”

Erik made a strange choking sound. “What?”

“They’re yours if you want them, the men outside—” 

Then it was Charles’s turn to make a strange choking sound as Erik shut him up with his mouth. He didn’t think it was his distorted perception of time that made the kiss go on for long minutes. At some point Erik pushed him to sit up straight and straddled his lap and Charles could feel his palms on the sides of his neck, long fingers in his hair cupping his skull, and he thought of dirty fingerprints on precious crystal and how Erik was touching him like it was the last chance he’d ever get. There was something different about the way he kissed and Charles didn’t think it had anything to do with the fact that technically Erik wasn’t physically present at all. Usually he liked to take control and keep it; now he was clumsy and desperate, biting at Charles’s lips and breathing heavily through his nose like he was unwilling to pull away for a single second. It was stifling and perfect and only the image of the two of them on the rug in front of the fire that Erik unwittingly pushed into his mind reminded him of where they were—or weren’t.

“I have a hundred men in my head, darling. I’m not _that_ much of an exhibitionist.”

Erik bent his head and nodded into Charles’s neck. His chest was heaving and fast, warm breaths blew over Charles’s collarbone. With his face tucked out of sight Charles wondered if he’d imagined drops of something hot and wet trickling through his fingers when he’d had them pressed against Erik’s cheeks.

“Say it again,” Erik said thickly.

“They’re yours,” Charles repeated. “The General wanted a weapon and he got one. Then he gave me an army. I’ll give it to you. For your preemptive strike against humanity.”

“You would never say this,” Erik said. He drew in a deep breath and lifted his head, searching Charles’s face with red-rimmed eyes. “I’ve dreamed of it knowing you would never say it. You’re not well. You’re not yourself. What’s happening to you in Cerebro right now?”

“You keep saying that. I’m not myself, I’m not myself. I don’t think it’s me you’re trying to convince,” Charles chided gently. He wasn’t sure what was happening to him in Cerebro, or what was happening to the hundred soldiers still under his control, and found he didn’t much care; he preferred it here. He gave Erik a small, teasing smile. “And wasn’t it also you who said I wouldn’t make the offer if some part of me wasn’t willing to carry it out? That we didn’t have to wait until the world was ending to work together again?” 

Erik didn’t smile back. “The world _will_ end if we do this, Charles. The only difference is we’ll be the ones that end it.”

“Wasn’t that what you wanted?”

Erik stood and began to pace in front of the fire, scrubbing at the stubble on his jaw in agitation. He hadn’t shaved in a few days and Charles was reminded of how he’d looked just after his rescue—unshaven, unwashed, exhausted and stretched thin but determined to be there when Charles woke up, tensing every time Hank came into the room like he expected to be thrown out. 

“I don’t know,” Erik said. “I used to know. I used to be so certain. The only thing I’m certain of now is that if you do this and it doesn’t kill you, it’ll make you wish it had. You were trapped in a dying man’s mind once because of me. I won’t let you do it again, much less a hundred of them at once.”

Charles closed his eyes and sagged back against the couch. Of course Erik insisted on engaging with the real world, which only highlighted the fact that the pressure behind his temples was building again. He saw intermittent flashes of metal—the interior of Cerebro, his mind trying to return to the safety of a physical body as overexertion began to wear on him. He wondered if he could send all the soldiers to sleep and take a nap himself, just a few minutes to regroup, but something had kept him from doing that in the first place. He pulled the relevant information from one of the soldier’s minds, grimacing a little. “Their orders were to fly under radio silence but if they don’t report back to their superiors by 1300 hours the mission will be assumed a failure. Even if I could hold them indefinitely it would give us away as surely as if I sent them back with their memories wiped.”

“Thirty minutes,” Erik said, looking at the clock above the fireplace. “Not enough time. We need more time.”

Charles opened his eyes. His mouth had fallen open too, he wasn’t sure when. The idea had come to him so fully-formed that he wondered if it was even his own, if he hadn’t plucked it from Erik’s head or one of the soldier’s idle thoughts. But Erik was still staring into the fire despairingly and none of the soldiers would have harbored such treasonous thoughts, so it had to be his. The rashness he’d felt was tempered with a sense of purpose and serenity filled him, warm like a guiding hand on his shoulder.

“You’re exactly right,” he said. He got to his feet, stumbled only a little. “We need more time. Fortunately I know where we can get some.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will I finish this by XMA? _Will I_? STAY TUNED


	24. Charles (3)

The anti-tank missile threw up a wall of dirt as it exploded in the center of the back lawn. Even braced for the high whistle of its descent and the boom of impact, Erik winced. At best his ears would be ringing for days; at worst he was looking at partial hearing loss. He shook his head to clear it and squinted against the sun to focus on the line of missiles and machine guns bobbing in midair. Most of them had required metal scaffolding for him to be able to control them and Charles was down a BMW convertible as a result, but the sacrifice was for a good cause. He gestured again and the machine guns opened fire into the northwest corner of the mansion, spraying glass and chunks of stone into the air. Bullets ricocheted into antique furniture and stuck there, shattered expensive sculptures and tore through portraits of long-dead Xaviers.

 _I never liked them anyway_ , Charles mused. Then, lightly, _Are you having fun, my friend?_

He could feel Erik’s amusement. _Might I remind you that this was your idea?_

_That you agreed so quickly ought to have told me something about the kind of idea it was._

_One as idiotic and brilliant as you are._ Erik went from near-playful to deadly serious in a microsecond. With his naturally stoic expressions Charles might not have noticed the shift if they’d been face to face, but telepathic control made subterfuge impossible. Erik couldn’t have lied to him right now if he’d wanted to, and he didn’t want to. He waited for permission until Charles sent a warm rush of affirmation in lieu of words and seconds later the next missile hit. Charles saw the wreckage through Erik’s eyes and wondered that they’d been eating pancakes only a few hours before at the exact spot on the veranda that he was standing now. 

Reluctantly Charles turned his thoughts away from Erik and back to the soldiers gathered on the lawn, all of whom he’d directed to watch as the destruction rained down on its target. They’d come to attack the mansion; that’s exactly what they would see happen. The fewer false memories he needed to plant in them the better; he had plenty of other tasks, very little time to complete them, and rapidly dwindling reserves of energy and telepathy. Then he cast his mind out further still.

_ETA, Raven?_

_Less than ten minutes._

She sounded distracted, but Charles knew it was because most of her focus was on keeping up with Hank as they both sprinted back the way they’d come. She had shifted into the body of an Olympic athlete and still only just managed to match the speed Hank’s mutation gave him. Alex wouldn’t have stood a chance and didn’t trust Emma alone with the students in any case, so he’d remained with them, where he was primarily occupied with keeping Ororo calm so they didn’t have to factor sudden thunderstorms into an already-dubiously workable plan. 

Charles sent Raven wordless acknowledgment—it was easier to communicate in pulses of emotion rather than forming specific messages—and set himself to his primary task: convincing one hundred objectively intelligent men that they had won a battle that never took place.

Commands and memories were different animals, unfortunately. He’d never been aware of how different until this moment. The same command would take hold in a hundred or indeed a thousand unique minds irrespective of personality type, natural telepathic resistance, or exterior physical circumstances. Telepathic orders—at least from a telepath of his strength—were irresistible. The quandary of morality: overriding free will, making someone do something they would never do themselves. Leave innocents unmassacred, in this particular case. But a mind knew its own memories. It knew the difference between memories and dreams, things that had happened while drunk and while sober, the gaps that formed when something had been repressed due to trauma or lost through simple forgetfulness. An intelligent mind would reject false memories or, if it had been warned about telepathic manipulation, see them for what they were and report them to their superiors. He couldn’t insert the same images into one hundred heads and hope they took without raising suspicion. 

That meant a hundred unique sets of memories inserted into a hundred individual minds on a level deep enough to be incorporated into what they’d actually seen—their weapons firing, the mansion’s west wing being reduced to rubble—and specific enough that when debriefed everyone would have their own distinct recollections of the same overall events. 

He began with the crews of the three helicopters. Gave them memories of their aircrafts hovering over the mansion at the height Erik had stationed the line of missiles, woven together with old memories of practice drills and countdown initiation sequences. One copilot got a memory of missing a step in the checklist before firing; his partner a corresponding memory of chastising him for the mistake. He gave them separate angles of approach, targets, conversations between each crew. Seeking a logical completion of events, those false memories immediately began to intertwine with the real ones of Erik’s attack on the mansion. And then he inserted ten seconds’ worth of memories into three of their minds that included Alex Summers running out onto the lawn and being mown down by bullets before he could get out a single blast with his powers. His death early in the altercation would explain why there was no laser damage to any of the vehicles.

Then Charles moved on, down the regimented lines of soldiers that stretched across the lawn.

It began to wear on him after a while. “A while” was only a few minutes, but since he had to be in and out of each mind in a maximum of twenty seconds, for three soldiers a minute and even that would almost be cutting it too close to the 1300 hours deadline, a few minutes was a small eternity. He couldn’t disengage from any of their minds even after planting the new memories and was beginning to feel a sharp cramp in his own mind like the kind he’d feel in his fingers after too long spent hanging by the strength in one hand. Since he hadn’t disengaged from his own peoples’ minds either he could feel Erik’s rising worry for him, the temptation to disobey Charles’s orders and come to Cerebro now, and below that a thread of curiosity—would Charles even let him disobey? He agreed with their plan but if he hadn’t, would it have made any difference? It was idle curiosity with no suspicion or ill intent behind it; most of Erik’s focus was bent on the missiles. He had always considered himself a weapon and now, to his mind, Charles had agreed and was using him as such. 

Erik reveled in his victory and aimed a truckload of machine guns at the next target he’d been given. His concept of victory had always been unique, Charles thought.

Charles wrenched himself away from the comfort of Erik’s mind and moved on to his next target as well. 

The hardest part was periodically inserting graphically detailed images of his own peoples’ deaths. Each death would require corroboration from multiple sources, which meant crafting the same image from three or four different perspectives. He gave three soldiers unique memories of Erik’s body riddled with ceramic bullets, so many that the force of them kept him swaying on his feet for a few seconds after the shooting stopped before he collapsed. Another four saw the lower half of Hank’s body disappear in the flash of a grenade that had rolled to a stop at his feet. The upper half scrabbled weakly at the ground until Charles gave one soldier the memory of putting a bullet through Hank’s head and several others memories of witnessing it. Raven “died” on the back steps of the mansion, brought to her knees by machine gun fire to the stomach and in too much pain to crawl away as three soldiers advanced on her across the lawn. Charles crafted an image of her last seconds from the distance of only a few feet: her face twisted with agony and inevitability, tears streaking her cheeks, black blood oozing between the ineffectual fingers she had pressed to her abdomen. He gave the memory of cutting her throat to a soldier who had done it before and knew the sensation of a carotid artery spurting blood to the rhythm of a faltering heartbeat; the real memory filled in the sensory gaps of the false one. 

Charles had just moved on to his own death when Raven’s thoughts careened into his own, startling him enough that he felt the flinch in his real body, down in Cerebro.

_Charles, we’re here!_

_Raven, don’t look—_

But he couldn’t separate their thoughts enough to keep the image from her and it slipped into her mind with only slightly less intensity than the minds of the six soldiers who would remember it as fact. One of the armored vehicles had an anti-tank missile mounted to the back (or had had one, before Erik repurposed it) and the soldiers who had trained to operate it were young, the most inexperienced in the squadron. Charles took their memories of a slipup in training, combined them with reality as the missile fired and the far side of west wing finally collapsed entirely, debris now reaching as high as the ceiling of the former sitting room, and at the last moment inserted himself. They saw him appear in the doorway just as the missile hit left of its intended target; the wall’s structural integrity fail and the unstoppable descent of thousands of pounds of steel and stone begin; the futile attempt by a mirror image of Charles to clear the blast radius in time. And when the dust settled they saw his body impaled on four different spikes and a chunk of limestone where his head had once been. 

And Raven saw it too.

Telepathic screams were even more deafening than vocal screams. Pain lanced through Charles’s head and he was almost glad when she began to vomit on the grass instead, fear and grief and denial overcoming her rational certainty that he was alive and unhurt.

_Oh God, Charles, Charles—_

_Raven, I’m fine! Can you focus? I won’t force you but I could use your help._

_Jesus, fuck—yes, yes, I’m here._ She got to her feet, spat the taste out, wiped her mouth on her arm, which was blue again after the athlete’s form she’d borrowed for the sprint back to the mansion. _You bastard! After this I’m going to yell at you almost as much as I’m going to yell at Erik for taking off without us like that. Total tools, both of you. Now show me what you need._

Charles planted the faces and locations of a dozen men in her mind. He’d given the same number to Hank, who was already hard at work. The memories he’d given those twenty-four included physical injuries. Even if the mansion had been taken entirely unawares, as he was telling the soldiers it had, it would be suspicious if they sustained no casualties at all—the soldiers themselves had expected the mutants to fight back, and they would get what they’d expected. 

_You want me to run around punching these guys in the face?_ Raven sent disbelievingly.

_If you like. Feel free to get creative. I don’t think any of them need more children, for instance._

Raven’s response was a wave of glee that frankly he found a little too overenthusiastic. She was already sprinting again, covering what should have been an impossible amount of ground per stride and building up speed for the first blow. From a great distance—he was in the man’s head but shielded from his physical sensations—Charles felt a punch so hard the jawbone cracked, followed by a kick to the genitals that ruptured something crucial.

 _Five minute warning. We’re running out of time, Charles,_ Erik informed him. _And I’m out of ammunition._

 _Right._ Charles snapped back to his own task. Only a handful of minds left to feed false memories now. He was beginning to dare to hope that they might pull this off—it wouldn’t be enough to win them respite from the humans forever, but if his work held even after the soldiers left his telepathic range and direct control, if their supervisors believed them or were at least slow to realize the holes in their stories, then he would have bought enough time to concoct a long-term plan. That tentative hope fed into the sense of absurdity that had been building as he’d watched his friends and then himself die awful deaths. He’d willingly given life to his worst nightmares, which one hundred men now accepted as fact. They’d made it easier by lacking the General’s spirit of scientific inquiry; their goal had been to kill mutants and, aside from the six men who had “accidentally” killed Charles Xavier and anticipated punishment accordingly, they felt only pride and the satisfaction of a job well done. 

The hope and absurdity began a strange transmutation into hilarity as he switched from individual memory insertion back to telepathic commands to the group. They obediently climbed back into their vehicles—the twenty-four he’d assigned to Raven and Hank required help and, in a few cases, immediate medical attention—and started the engines. The trucks turned and headed back down the main road they’d torn up not long before. The helicopters lifted into the air. Hank and Raven watched them, walking backwards across the ruined lawn toward the mountains of debris where a good chunk of the mansion had once stood, reluctant to turn their backs to the army until it vanished.

Charles released his hold on all of their minds at the same time, which also caused him to slip back into his own physical form with a jolt like he’d anticipated a final step that didn’t exist in a pitch-black stairway. He was grounded in his body, blinking at the curved walls of Cerebro and tasting copper. Had his nose been bleeding this whole time? The urge to laugh was building in him, gradual but irresistible even as he desperately clamped down on it.

 _Their communications are active. They’re transmitting a report._ A fraught silence, and then Erik’s mind shouted its relief and pride so loudly Charles couldn’t believe even non-telepaths couldn’t hear it. _They’re not turning back. They must have received confirmation and orders to return back to base. Charles, you—Charles?_

Charles had finally burst out laughing. Gratitude and incredulity and a fierce love for his school and its inhabitants—permanent or not—and the blissful sensation of his telepathy finally reintegrated with his mind and body like a broken limb suddenly made whole, all felt on top of exhaustion that hit him like a physical blow to the head—it was too much. He was giddy and choking with laughter, overwhelmed in a way that made his head hurt even more, but then even breathing made his head hurt even more. He wondered if his skull would split with the pain, flashed back to the memory he’d given the soldiers of his skull splitting under a chunk of rock, laughed even harder.

_Charles, please, hold on—_

Erik’s relief had gone sour with panic as he ran around the side of the mansion to an entrance that wasn’t blocked by rubble, calculating the fastest route to the lab given recent events. 

_It was a pleasure working with you, darling,_ Charles sent a bit dizzily, and he meant to stay awake for Erik, he truly did, but the nap he’d craved earlier in the telepathic space he’d created for them suddenly seemed like an even better idea. He’d earned it, hadn’t he? Carefully he removed the helmet, set it on the control panel, initiated the power-down sequence as Hank had shown him, and allowed himself to drift off ten seconds before Erik burst into Cerebro screaming his name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did someone rec this story somewhere? i feel like there are more you which is wonderful but also sad because we're almost done (insert dozens of frowny face emojis here)!!! i will miss all of you like whoa. you have been da bomb.


	25. Raven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank [listerinezero](http://archiveofourown.org/users/listerinezero/works) for the happy ending here bc my first impulse was all angst all the time. But she asked and hopefully I delivered :)

Charles slept for three days and woke up asking for Erik and a cup of tea.

“Nope,” Raven said. He blinked up at her woozily, frowning with the entitlement of a little boy who couldn’t understand why he wasn’t getting his way. “You get me and a glass of water, which you are going to drink _slowly_. Erik can come visit you later.”

“Are you going to yell at me now?” Charles pouted. 

“In a bit,” Raven said, stroking back his greasy hair. When she closed her eyes she could still see him disappearing under a cascade of stone and steel, the unnatural angles of his mangled body as the dust cleared. It had the clarity and emotional resonance of a real memory, which hadn’t kept it from also following her into her nightmares for the past three nights. Objectively she’d seen worse things over the years, but this was Charles. That had been enough to convince Erik to come with her in Florida; it was still enough of an explanation now. 

“Are we safe?” Charles asked after a few careful sips of water. It should have been a rhetorical question—if they weren’t they’d probably all be dead already and he certainly wouldn’t have been allowed to sleep for three days—which meant it wasn’t about the question. He needed to hear the answer, needed reassurance from someone he trusted that their hare-brained scheme had somehow succeeded. Raven nodded. Her throat felt strangely tight and her eyes prickled and when she snorted with self-deprecating laughter it sounded wet. 

“How are the students?” Charles said, pretending not to notice.

“Worried about you. Scared at first. Now I think they’re mostly excited about the new pool that’s going in that gigantic crater on the back lawn.”

Charles smiled, exhausted but fully himself for the first time since his rescue. “Oh, they’re getting a new pool?”

“And a new training area in the west wing where the sitting room and ballroom used to be. Obstacle courses, rock climbing walls, the whole shebang. I may have made a few promises.”

“Expensive ones, it sounds like.”

“You’re good for it, you big trust fund baby.”

Charles wriggled an arm free from the blankets and groped for her hand, then closed his eyes. Raven knew the difference between Charles gathering his thoughts and Charles falling back asleep and she waited patiently as he combed through his memories, reacquainting himself with what had happened in reality and what had only happened in his mind. She tried to imagine what it had been like for him in that half-hour of godlike control over them and couldn’t. When Erik had burst into the infirmary with an unconscious and bloody body in his arms, they had half-expected a relapse, a coma, some kind of post-traumatic episode to equal or rival his trouble adjusting after his rescue. Instead he seemed somehow older and younger at the same time, serene in that way that came with confidence and greater maturity. She wondered if she’d ever really understood him at all. 

Charles opened his eyes again. This time his smile was smaller, apologetic. “Did I scare you too?”

Raven thought about it. The moment required nothing less than absolute honesty. Finally she admitted, “I think you’ve always scared me. Your powers are…intimidating. But knowing that you’ll fight for mutants too, that I can count on you…that makes me trust you more. And that makes you less scary.” She held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Like, a little less. That was still—wow.”

“I’ll try not to make a habit of it,” Charles said. 

“I think we’d all appreciate that. And look—if you want a cup of tea and I’m in the kitchen, or you need something from your room while you’re in the lab, you can let me know.” She tapped her finger against her temple. “Just don’t go spelunking in there, okay? Let me keep some stuff to myself.”

Charles looked like he wanted to ask if she meant it but was too afraid the answer would be no. Instead he pressed a grateful kiss to her knuckles and said quickly, “Yes. Yes, of course.”

“Mutant and proud, right?” Raven said wryly as she freed her hand and stood up, suppressing a guilty urge to apologize for…something. They’d both left so much unsaid over the years that she didn’t know where to begin and frankly didn’t want to; she’d done enough wallowing in the past, and was ready to move forward with anyone who could keep up. As Charles would say, that would have to be enough to be going on with. And that was quite enough talking about feelings for now, she thought. “I’ll have Erik bring you that tea. Don’t you dare try to get out of bed.”

They had always been a special kind of gross, but Charles and Erik were practically nauseating over the next few days. Erik might as well have magnetized himself to Charles’s wheelchair. They came down to breakfast together, played chess every night, didn’t even pretend they weren’t sharing a room. Sometimes she heard Erik’s voice coming from the library and peeked through the cracked door to find him on the sofa reading to a sleeping Charles, his hand absently stroking through over-long hair. They spent a lot of time staring at each other which she hoped meant telepathic conversations but might well have just been them staring at each other and Erik had a tendency to overreact and shoo Charles back to bed if his skin paled even the slightest bit. Whatever they did behind their closed door sounded more satisfying and intricate than usual and made Raven deeply regret taking the room next door.

She teased them mercilessly. Erik blushed and scowled a lot. Charles had figured out the telepathic equivalent of flicking her ear when she was being obnoxious and used it more often than she liked and far less than she deserved. 

Scott and Ororo started crying the night they had their first argument. Even barricaded in the study their voices carried, mostly unintelligible except for the odd phrase like “unjust persecution” or “rushing evolution” which Raven understood only because they were so familiar in arguments between Charles and Erik. But the volume and tone of their voices conveyed the severity of the disagreement as eloquently as words would have done. 

Her attempt to distract the students in the kitchen with a group effort at baking cookies worked until Erik stormed out of the study and into his room, slamming both doors. Two minutes later he stormed back shouting, “And another thing—!” before the study door slammed on the second half of the sentence. Ororo wailed even louder and thunder crackled outside.

“It’ll be okay,” Jean said. She wasn’t crying; in fact, she hardly seemed upset at all.

“What makes you say that?” Raven asked as she “supervised” Jean scooping spoonfuls of dough onto the baking sheets, a task that involved eating most of the dough herself.

“They don’t think as different as they did before. The Professor doesn’t like all the humans as much as he used to and Mr. Magneto doesn’t want them all to go away at once anymore. The Professor wouldn’t like it.” She scrunched her face up in what was either a grimace of extreme focus on dough placement or confusion at nonsensical adult behavior. “They just like arguing. I don’t understand why, though.”

“Welcome to the club,” Raven said, because she didn’t particularly want to explain foreplay to a ten-year-old. 

Fortunately, the shouting died down not too long after that, Ororo and Scott stopped crying, the cookies produced a minimal sugar high that delayed bedtime by only forty-five minutes, and eventually Erik emerged from the study and returned with two cups of tea, which was usually a sign that the worst of the argument was over. Raven took the bottle of gin she’d swiped from the library while Charles was otherwise occupied and went out onto the back lawn, where she sat on a vaguely chair-shaped piece of debris and did a couple of shots’ worth in long sips. Earlier in the afternoon she had checked in with the Brotherhood, ordered them to prioritize the search for intel on the Nevada black site that had held Emma Frost and all known associated units, especially military ones. Tomorrow she would sit down with Charles and Erik and tell them that she was leaving again. She would then propose a trial alliance between the X-Men and the Brotherhood with Erik and herself as liaisons, beginning with a mission to find the people who had tortured Charles. It was the most she could do; the rest would be up to them.

An hour later, as she wandered a little drunkenly down the hall toward her room, a thin beam of light shining from the library door drew her attention. She leaned against the wall for balance and eavesdropped shamelessly on the soft voices drifting from the direction of the sofa. Charles was speaking in a low murmur that she couldn’t quite catch, but Erik’s response was clear. He sounded tired, a little sad, but calm in a way made strange by its rarity. Yet it suited him, somehow.

“I don’t know, _schatz_. I make no promises. But I hope so.”

Charles made a sound somewhere between laughter and the beginning of tears. “You hope,” he said. “That’s enough.”

Raven turned away and went to bed, thinking that perhaps Jean was right. Wondering if it was safe for her to hope as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brb questioning who I am now that this fic is over. It took five months almost to the day and was finished before XMA and I am super proud of myself but also like whoaaaaa. [garnettrees](http://archiveofourown.org/users/garnettrees), i owe you forever and always for your help <3s
> 
> Also I would be so super grateful if any of you guys have criticism/noticed things I could do better in future writing/etc. Stylistic weaknesses, moments that felt out of character, pacing problems--have at it. I'd love to become a better writer and need all the help I can get :)


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